Truck problems, complaints and recalls
What owners actually reported to the federal government, by model year and by component — not forum anecdotes, and not our opinion. Straight from the NHTSA defects database.
How to read complaint data
NHTSA collects complaints from vehicle owners and publishes them without verifying them. That makes the database genuinely useful and genuinely easy to misread. Three things worth holding onto:
- Volume tracks sales, not quality. The F-150 outsells most trucks several times over, so it collects more complaints at any given defect rate. Compare a truck to its own other years.
- Recent years look artificially clean. Complaints accumulate over the life of a vehicle. A truck released two years ago has not had time to gather them.
- Category matters more than count. Two hundred complaints about exterior lighting is a different situation from two hundred about the transmission.
What the data is very good for: spotting a system that a lot of owners of one specific model year independently had trouble with, and finding recall campaigns you may not have had performed.
Common questions
Where does this data come from?
The NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation, through the federal government's public api.nhtsa.gov. Complaints are reports submitted by vehicle owners; recalls are campaigns filed by the manufacturer with the agency. Both are public domain records, refreshed here monthly.
Does a complaint mean the truck has a defect?
No. A complaint is an unverified report from one owner. NHTSA publishes them as filed and does not confirm them. They are useful in aggregate — a system that hundreds of owners report is a signal — but any single complaint may be a one-off, a maintenance issue, or a misunderstanding.
Why does the best-selling truck have the most complaints?
Because complaint counts scale with how many trucks are on the road. A model that sells 700,000 units a year will out-complain one that sells 90,000 even if it is built better. That is why these pages compare a truck against its own other model years rather than ranking models against each other.
How do I check whether a recall applies to my truck?
Enter your VIN at nhtsa.gov/recalls. A campaign listed on these pages covers a range of production, not every truck of that model year, and recall work is performed free at a franchised dealer regardless of the vehicle's age or how many owners it has had.
Source: NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation (api.nhtsa.gov), public domain. Last refreshed 2026-08-10.