ProblemsByVin/vehicle-reliability-scorecard

Vehicle Reliability Scorecard

One row per vehicle (year + make + model) with its ProblemsByVin reliability score, total NHTSA complaints, recalls, and defect investigations, plus the single component owners complain about most. The master index across the whole tracked fleet — the flat table to join every other dataset to.

Columns

column	meaning
year	Model year
make	Manufacturer
model	Model
reliability_score	1.0 (worst) – 5.0 (best); shown on site as ×2 out of 10
complaints	Total NHTSA owner complaints
recalls	Total NHTSA recalls
investigations	NHTSA ODI defect investigations touching this vehicle
top_component	Component category with the most complaints
top_component_complaints	Complaints in that top component
worst_severity	Highest cluster severity: critical | severe | moderate
alleged_deaths	Complaints alleging a death (unverified)
alleged_fires	Complaints alleging a fire (unverified)
url	Vehicle page on ProblemsByVin

Source & methodology

The reliability score is a TRANSPARENT heuristic on a 1.0 (worst) – 5.0 (best) scale (the site shows it ×2, out of 10). It starts at 5.0 and subtracts log10(complaints + 1) × 0.55, 0.30 per critical recall, and 0.10 per severe recall. It is a complaint-and-recall-VOLUME signal, NOT a per-capita failure rate: we do not yet have sales/registration denominators, so higher-volume models can score lower simply because more of them are on the road. "top_component" is the component category with the most complaints for that vehicle. Alleged death/fire counts are sums of unverified consumer allegations across the vehicle’s complaints. Motorcycles are excluded (this site is cars-only).

Canonical version, full methodology, and the other datasets: https://problemsbyvin.com/data/ .

License

CC BY 4.0 — free to use with attribution to ProblemsByVin (https://problemsbyvin.com).