answer
What the official records show
Across the eight selected vehicle-generation cohorts in the Phase 5 source pack, 5,283 NHTSA owner complaint records carried the ENGINE component tag. Those tagged records included 109 reports marked as involving a crash and 173 marked as involving a fire; injury and death fields summed to 64 injuries and 1 deaths. The largest selected vehicle totals were Ford F-150 (1,583), Honda CR-V (1,244), Chevrolet Silverado 1500 (650), Jeep Wrangler (595), and Honda Accord (569). These cohorts are a launch sample, not a ranking of every vehicle sold in the United States.
SOURCES
- NHTSA complaint and recall aggregateNHTSA Consumer Complaints · primary source
custom
How to interpret the pattern
NHTSA component tags organize owner complaints but do not identify a verified root cause, repair procedure, or population failure rate. Counts can be influenced by vehicle sales, age, use, reporting behavior, model-name variants, and multi-component tagging. For that reason, Car Trouble Lab publishes the sample boundary, capture date, and per-vehicle drill-down instead of turning this number into a reliability score. The comparison is useful for finding where a category appears repeatedly and which model-year records to inspect next. It is not evidence that one named vehicle is worse than another without an exposure denominator.
methodology
What to check next
Select a vehicle cohort, then move to its model-year page to see the local complaint distribution and associated recall campaigns. For a vehicle you own, use the observed symptom and current diagnostic evidence to choose tests before parts. For a used vehicle, combine the category history with a VIN recall check, repair invoices, and a current inspection. Car Trouble Lab does not convert a complaint tag into a diagnosis and does not determine whether a vehicle is safe to drive. Official recalls and manufacturer instructions take priority over this aggregate view.