What breaks on the car you’re about to buy
You’ve found a specific car: one model, one year, one seller. PartMatchup shows what owners of that model year actually reported to the U.S. federal safety regulator — and what to check on the car standing in front of you.
Model years covered
More model years are being added. Counts are not comparable between models — here is why.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure on this site is computed from data published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: the consumer complaint database, the recall campaign database, and NCAP crash-test results. Nothing is estimated, scored or weighted by us. You can follow any number back to its source.
The complaint database has one property that governs how this site is built: it records how many people complained, but not how many cars were sold. So a model with more complaints is not a worse model — it may simply be a more common one. Read about the data before drawing conclusions from any number here.
What the data can’t tell you
Statistics describe a population of cars. They cannot tell you about the one car in the seller’s driveway. That is what the inspection checklist on each page is for: it was written and checked by someone who does this work on their own cars, and the data decides only which checks are listed first.
The checklists are deliberately cautious in their wording. A checklist that talks you out of a sound car is worse than no checklist at all.