Methodology

Safety Signal

Safety Signal starts every model-year at 100 and subtracts points per open NHTSA recall campaign by severity: critical 15 (fire risk, park-outside or do-not-drive advisories), high 8 (brakes, steering, airbags, loss of drive power, structure, battery), moderate 6, minor 3 (software, labels, lighting fixed by an update). Floor 35. A ≥ 90, B ≥ 80, C ≥ 70, D ≥ 60, otherwise F. Complaint counts and NHTSA crash ratings are shown separately and are not blended into the grade.

Nameplates and years

A "vehicle" on this site is one nameplate in one model year as defined by the EPA's base-model field, so gas, hybrid and plug-in versions of the same nameplate share a page and their recalls are shown together with a powertrain tag where NHTSA distinguishes them. NHTSA and EPA spell model names differently; we match them automatically and publish the leftovers in our build report so the alias table keeps improving.

Complaints

Counts are unique NHTSA complaint numbers per model year. They are not normalized by sales, so best-sellers look worse than they are; we show them as a pattern signal and never blend them into the grade.

Trim specs

Trim-level specifications, features and MSRP are transcribed from the manufacturer's official press kit or newsroom spec sheet by a model-assisted pipeline validated against hand-curated ground truth at roughly 95% cell accuracy; each value carries its source URL and a confidence score in the data file.

Refresh

Weekly. Generated 2026-09-11 02:56 UTC.