Safety

Crash ratings, recalls and owner-reported faults for electric cars, kept separate from each other because they measure different things. A crash rating is a laboratory result under a fixed protocol; a recall is a manufacturer accepting that something shipped wrong; an owner complaint is an unverified report that sometimes precedes both. Combining them into one score would hide exactly the distinctions a buyer needs, so we do not. Euro NCAP and NHTSA results are shown separately for the same reason: the two programmes use different tests, different weightings and different star arithmetic, and a five-star result under one is not a five-star result under the other. Where a car has been rated by only one of them, the other column stays blank rather than being filled with a guess. The three pieces in this section: what EV owners actually complain about, from 4,839 NHTSA reports, every electric car gets five stars — rollover risk is the number that still separates them, and 147 EV recalls, and the 20 that were fixed without a workshop visit.

Where to start: the rollover-risk piece is the shortest route to what still separates cars that all carry five stars; the recalls piece separates the faults that needed a workshop from those that were fixed without a workshop visit; the complaints piece shows what owners report most often. All three draw on public NHTSA records, and every count names the date it was read. Ratings and recalls change, so check the manufacturer and NHTSA for a specific vehicle before you buy.