Check any car's recalls and real owner complaints

The CarHooq Car Problem Lookup is a free tool that shows the known problems of a specific car by make, model and model year. For each car it lists every safety recall, the owner complaints filed with the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the owners' own words, and the components owners report most often. It covers 19 brands, 302 models and 2,188 model years from 2012–2027.

Type any combination of make, model and year, in any order, such as "2019 VW Tiguan", "F-150 2021" or "Model 3". Short names work too: VW, Chevy, Merc and Benz are all understood. You can also browse by brand, then model, then model year, to compare the years of one model side by side.

19 U.S. and European brands: Alfa Romeo, Audi, BMW, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Ford, GMC, Jaguar, Jeep, Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Mini, Porsche, Ram, Tesla, Volkswagen and Volvo, for model years 2012–2027.

Recalls and owner complaints come from NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation, the official U.S. government database (public domain). UK MOT results come from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency's anonymised MOT test data, published under the Open Government Licence. UK and EU recalls come from the DVSA recall database and the European Commission's Safety Gate alerts. Every page shows the date its data was last refreshed (currently October 25, 2026) and links to the original source.

7,650 safety recalls and 337,698 owner complaints, across 2,188 model-year pages. The database is rebuilt from the official sources about once a month.

It tells you which recalls were issued for your car's make, model and year, but not whether the repair was already done on your specific vehicle. To check that, enter your 17-character VIN at nhtsa.gov/recalls in the U.S., or your registration number at check-vehicle-recalls.service.gov.uk in the UK. Recall repairs are free at an authorised dealer.

No. NHTSA publishes complaints as submitted by owners and does not verify each one. A single complaint proves little; the useful signal is a pattern, such as dozens of owners describing the same failure. Popular cars also collect more complaints simply because more of them are on the road, so compare a car with its direct rivals and with its own other model years.

The MOT is the annual roadworthiness test that cars in Great Britain must pass from three years old. The first-time failure rate is the share of MOT tests a car fails before any repairs. CarHooq shows it per make, model and year of first registration, the most common failure reasons, and how the car compares with the average car of the same age.

Yes. It is free, needs no account and no VIN, and works on phones and computers. You are welcome to link to or cite any page; the underlying government data is public.

Look up the exact model year you are considering, read the recalls and confirm with the seller or a dealer that each one was repaired, and scan the most-reported problems so you know what to check on a test drive. Then compare the neighbouring model years: problems often cluster in one or two years of a model.