Owners of electric cars filed 4,839 complaints with the American road-safety regulator about the fourteen models on this site. The most common subject is not the battery and not the motor: it is the electrical system, named in 1,810 of them. Nearly a quarter are about the car braking, warning or steering for something that was not there.
What owners actually complain about
NHTSA tags every complaint with one or more components. Counting those tags across all 4,839 records gives the table below. A complaint can name several components at once, so the shares add to more than a hundred per cent.
| Component | Complaints | Share | Reported a crash | Crash rate | Fire | Injuries |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electrical System | 1,810 | 37.4% | 84 | 4.6% | 22 | 63 |
| Forward Collision Avoidance | 1,134 | 23.4% | 207 | 18.3% | 4 | 104 |
| Unknown or Other | 812 | 16.8% | 107 | 13.2% | 7 | 41 |
| Vehicle Speed Control | 503 | 10.4% | 124 | 24.7% | 1 | 63 |
| Steering | 469 | 9.7% | 85 | 18.1% | 1 | 58 |
| Service Brakes | 445 | 9.2% | 139 | 31.2% | 1 | 62 |
| Power Train | 401 | 8.3% | 17 | 4.2% | 2 | 9 |
| Fuel/Propulsion System | 365 | 7.5% | 20 | 5.5% | 4 | 13 |
| Lane Departure | 308 | 6.4% | 63 | 20.5% | 1 | 33 |
| Back Over Prevention | 221 | 4.6% | 58 | 26.2% | 0 | 13 |
Two things stand out. The electrical system dominates at 37.4 per cent — frozen screens, 12-volt failures, phantom warnings, doors and windows. And forward collision avoidance is second at 23.4 per cent, which is the formal name for a car braking hard at a shadow, an overpass or a car in the next lane.
Frequency and danger run in opposite directions
The obvious way to read a complaint database is that the biggest number is the biggest problem. This data says the opposite. The electrical system is named in 1,810 complaints and only 4.6 per cent of them involved a crash. Service brakes appear in 445 — a quarter as often — but 31.2 per cent of those involved a crash, the highest rate in the table.
That is what you would expect once it is said out loud. Faults that annoy you daily get reported constantly and hurt nobody. Faults that appear rarely get reported rarely and are dangerous when they do. A raw complaint count measures irritation, not risk.
Look up a component yourself
This reads the same figures as the table, so you can check any component against its own crash, fire and injury record rather than against the total.
Look up a component
Why we do not rank the cars on this
The obvious article here would rank the fourteen cars by complaint count. We are not going to, because the number is meaningless without sales volume and we hold no sales volume per model. A car that sold four hundred thousand units collects more complaints than one that sold four thousand, however good it is.
| Model | Complaints on file |
|---|---|
| Tesla Model Y | 1,554 |
| Hyundai Ioniq 5 | 922 |
| Tesla Model 3 | 765 |
| Volkswagen ID.4 | 527 |
| Kia EV6 | 260 |
| Kia EV9 | 241 |
| Ford Mustang Mach-E | 174 |
| Hyundai Ioniq 6 | 128 |
| BMW i4 | 83 |
| Rivian R1T | 59 |
| Nissan Ariya | 53 |
| Toyota bZ4X | 34 |
| Porsche Taycan | 28 |
| Volvo Ex30 | 11 |
The spread in that table is more than 141-fold, and it follows how many of each car are on American roads far more closely than it follows anything about the cars. It is printed so the point is visible rather than merely asserted. For a car-by-car safety comparison built on something that is normalised, the crash-test ratings on safest electric cars are the right place.
A complaint is not a recall
These records are filed by owners and verified by nobody. They are the raw input to the safety system, not its output. The output is a recall — a campaign the manufacturer runs to fix a defect it has accepted. We counted those separately: 147 recall entries across the same fourteen cars, of which only twenty were fixed over the air.
The ratio is the useful part. Thousands of complaints, a hundred and thirty-eight campaigns. Most reports never become anything, which is what an open reporting channel is supposed to look like.
The fire number, in context
Of the 4,839 complaints, 32 reported a fire — 0.7 per cent. Across every record there are 304 reported injuries and 3 reported deaths. These are self-reported and unverified, and they are a ceiling rather than a floor: a fire is exactly the kind of event an owner files about.
Filings have risen every year — 1,020 in 2023, 1,192 in 2024, 1,231 in 2025 and 1,374 so far in 2026 — which tracks the number of electric cars on the road rather than any change in how they are built. Long-term condition is a different question, and we measure that separately in battery degradation.
Where these numbers will mislead you
Nobody checks these reports. A complaint is one person’s account, filed without evidence. Patterns across thousands are informative; a single record is not.
The component tag is coarse. “Electrical system” covers a frozen screen and a dead 12-volt battery equally, and “unknown or other” is the third largest category at 16.8 per cent.
This is the United States only. European and UK owners report through different bodies, and nothing here describes those markets.
Frequently asked questions
What do electric car owners complain about most?
The electrical system, named in 1,810 of 4,839 complaints (37.4 per cent) — screens, 12-volt batteries, warnings, doors and windows. Driver-assistance systems come next: forward collision avoidance, lane departure and back-over prevention together appear in 28.7 per cent of complaints.
How many EV complaints involve a fire?
32 of 4,839, or 0.7 per cent. Two cars account for 21 of the 32 — the Volkswagen ID.4 and the Tesla Model Y — and both sell in large numbers here, so the raw counts say little on their own.
Does a high complaint count mean a car is unreliable?
No. Complaint counts scale with how many cars were sold. Without sales volume you cannot turn a count into a rate, and this dataset does not carry sales volume.
Which complaints are most likely to involve a crash?
Service brakes, at 31.2 per cent of the complaints naming them, then back-over prevention at 26.2 per cent and vehicle speed control at 24.7 per cent. All three are far rarer than the electrical complaints that dominate the count.
Sources
Complaint records come from the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, read through its public API on 2026-09-07 for model years 2023 to 2026; the agency publishes the same records at nhtsa.gov. Model names were discovered per make and year from the same API rather than assumed, because NHTSA files the same car under different names in different years — querying a fixed name silently loses most of the records. How we source and check figures is on the methodology page.