How to read public complaint data

Public records are full of numbers that look like answers. Most need some context before they mean anything. This page gives that context for the records our sites are built on.

What an owner complaint is

In the United States, anyone can report a vehicle safety problem to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). With personal details removed, each report joins a public database, which is what InsightArise Cars reads.

A complaint records that an owner said something happened. NHTSA does not verify individual complaints, and a complaint is not a finding that the vehicle is defective. The value is in the pattern across many reports, not in any single one.

Complaints, recalls and investigations are different things

• A complaint comes from an owner or occupant. It is unverified and describes an experience.
• A recall is a formal safety campaign: the manufacturer reports a defect or a failure to meet a federal safety standard, notifies owners and provides a free remedy, usually a repair. Most recalls are started by manufacturers; some follow an NHTSA investigation.
• A defect investigation is NHTSA's own inquiry, often prompted by a pattern of complaints. It usually starts as a preliminary evaluation, may move on to a deeper engineering analysis, and can end in a recall or be closed without one.

The three can point in different directions. A model can draw many complaints and no recall, because the problem is not a safety defect or because no one has yet shown that it is one. Read them together.

Why raw counts mislead

The number most people look at first, total complaints, is shaped by at least four things besides how well a vehicle is built:

• How many are on the road. A model that sells ten times as many vehicles will collect more reports of everything. The NHTSA data contains no sales figures.
• How long they have been on the road. A model year driven for eight years has had eight years to collect complaints; last year's model has had one.
• Who knows the system exists. Filing takes effort, and how readily owners do it varies by brand, region and vehicle price.
• Attention. A recall announcement or a news story can prompt many owners to file within weeks. Filing in general has also grown in recent years.

What a per-year figure and an index correct for

The main figure on InsightArise Cars corrects for the second of those four. For each model year it divides the number of complaints by the years since 1 January of that model year, with a minimum of one year. The result, complaints per year on the road, is used for every comparison and ranking. A model page shows the average of its model years' figures.

The complaint index divides that figure by the average of a comparison group: all tracked vehicles, the same brand, the same model year or the same segment. 1.00 is the group average; 2.00 is twice the group's rate. Trends use a separate measure: complaints filed in each model year's first 24 months, compared with other vehicles of the same model year, so the general rise in filing is not mistaken for a change in quality.

None of this corrects for sales volume, for differences in how readily owners report, or for publicity. The index measures report volume relative to a group; it is not a failure rate. A failure rate would need the number of vehicles in service and a count of verified failures, and this data contains neither. The exact rules, including the thresholds behind every label, are on the Cars methodology page.

A worked example

These figures are from the Honda CR-V page as rebuilt on 23 September 2026, with NHTSA data through 20 September 2026. The site is rebuilt every month, so the live page will show newer numbers; the reasoning is what carries over.

• The 2018 CR-V had 2,138 complaints and the 2023 CR-V had 631. On raw counts the 2018 model looks about 3.4 times worse.
• At that rebuild, the 2018 model year had been on the road for about 8.7 years and the 2023 model year for about 3.7. Divided out, that is 245.0 complaints per year on the road for 2018 and 169.3 for 2023: a gap of about 1.4 times, not 3.4.
• Across its nine tracked model years (2018–2026) the CR-V averaged 137.6 complaints per year on the road, an index of 3.44 against all tracked vehicles. The Compact SUVs average was 59.6, so the CR-V's rate was about 2.3 times its segment's, the highest of the 12 compact SUVs tracked.
• Steering accounted for 23.0% of its complaints, a share 3.6 times that across all tracked vehicles.

What this tells you: the CR-V drew far more reports per year than its peers, many of them in one area. That is the cue to open its steering page and the recalls and investigations listed for it. What it cannot tell you is how much of the gap is popularity: the CR-V is a high-volume model, and sales are not part of this data.

Reading procurement records

Our Taiwan procurement site, 標案智庫 (InsightArise Tenders), is built from the notices agencies publish on the Government e-Procurement System under the Government Procurement Act, from that system's open datasets, and from Taiwan's government open-data platform. Three kinds of notice matter most:

• A tender notice announces a purchase and its terms: what is being bought, the budget where published, and the bid deadline.
• An award notice records the result: who won, at what price, and by which award method.
• A failed-award notice says that round produced no contract, for example because no one bid or no bid qualified. The same purchase may come back as a new tender.

Correction notices amend earlier ones, so one case can carry several notices. The index of notices goes back to January 1999, but its depth is uneven. Full notice details, such as award amounts and bidder lists, are available mainly for recent cases, from 2023 onwards, and part of that period is still being filled in. Older cases are index-only: the title, agency, dates, notice type and, for some notices, the winning supplier, with a link to the original notice. So a blank amount on an older case means "not collected", not "zero", and price ranges for comparable awards, which need award details, describe recent years. The Tenders About page sets out its sources, update schedule and limits.

About this page. First published 3 October 2026. It was drafted using an AI model (Anthropic's Claude) and has not been reviewed by a person. The figures in the worked example are taken from the linked pages as they stood with NHTSA data through 20 September 2026 and are not updated automatically. If you find an error, write to contact@insightarise.com.