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A TEXAS TRUCK OWNER BUILT A DATABASE OF EVERY U.S. CAR DEFECT. IT FOUND 4,707 PROBLEMS THAT NEVER GOT A RECALL.

Garland, Texas - August 3, 2026

Every complaint an American driver files about a failing vehicle goes into a federal database. So does every recall, and every defect investigation the government opens. All of it is public. Almost none of it is readable to the person it was collected for.
ProblemsByVin, an independent vehicle-research site founded this year, was built to change that. It consolidates more than 825,000 owner complaints filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 4,938 recall campaigns, and NHTSA's open defect investigations, covering 16,277 vehicles across model years 2005 through 2026. The site reorganizes that record around the question drivers actually ask: what breaks on this exact year, make, and model, at roughly what mileage, and what does it cost to fix. It is free, requires no account, and can be searched by vehicle or by VIN.
Assembling the full record surfaced something the record does not report on its own.
Consumers widely treat a clean recall history as an all-clear. But a recall is not a measurement of how dangerous a defect is - it is a decision by a manufacturer or a regulator to act, and many heavily reported failures never receive one. When ProblemsByVin cross-referenced complaint clusters against NHTSA's recall database, it identified 4,707 defect patterns with no matching recall on the federal record. https://problemsbyvin.com/defects-with-no-recall Of those, 1,708 carry allegations of a crash, a fire, or an injury.
The largest single gap belongs to the 2017 Ford Escape, where 1,675 owner complaints describe the same engine failure pattern - four of them alleging fire. The vehicle carries four recall campaigns, none covering the failure its owners report most.
"'No recall' gets read as 'no problem,' and it isn't," said Mark Driver, the site's founder. "The hard part is proving a gap is real, because recall records are messy and incomplete. So we don't trust our own output - every one of those gaps is re-checked against NHTSA's live database before it's published."
The site is direct about the limits of its source material. NHTSA complaints are unverified consumer reports, not confirmed defects, and vehicles that sold in large numbers naturally accumulate large complaint totals. ProblemsByVin publishes raw counts alongside its scores rather than a single opaque grade, and states plainly that a late-model vehicle with few complaints is usually just new rather than reliable.
Other patterns emerge only at full scale. Electrical systems are now the most complained-about category in the entire record, at 114,802 complaints - ahead of powertrain, ahead of engine. The failure that strands a modern driver is no longer primarily mechanical.
Unusually for a consumer-facing car site, ProblemsByVin publishes the data underneath its own conclusions. Its datasets - reliability scores, failure-mileage distributions, post-warranty failure patterns, and the recall-gap analysis - are released under a CC BY 4.0 license as CSV and JSON with written methodology, and are mirrored to academic repositories. One, a distribution of failure mileage derived from NHTSA owner complaints, carries a permanent DOI (10.5281/zenodo.20648310).
"Download it and re-run it," Driver said. "I'd rather be corrected than quoted."
Driver, who works on his own 2017 Ford F-250, describes the project as an attempt to give buyers the pattern-level knowledge that mechanics accumulate one repair at a time. "The problem I was fixing in my driveway was never my problem," he said. "It was that engine's problem, in that model year, and a few thousand people had already found it before me. That information existed. It just wasn't reachable."
About ProblemsByVin
ProblemsByVin is an independent vehicle-research site that makes the U.S. federal defect record readable. It covers 16,277 vehicles from model years 2005 through 2026, drawing on more than 825,000 NHTSA owner complaints, 4,938 recall campaigns, and open defect investigations, and publishes original analysis plus open datasets under CC BY 4.0. The site is free and requires no account. It was founded in 2026 by Mark Driver and is based in Garland, Texas.
All figures reflect the live database as of August 3, 2026, and are reproducible from the published datasets. NHTSA owner complaints are unverified consumer reports.

https://problemsbyvin.com/data/