How long Autocar takes to tell owners

The delay · Autocar

Across 98 recalls with both dates on record, Autocar waited a median of 57 days between reporting a defect and writing to owners. That is 16 days longer than the register as a whole.

If your vehicle was made by Autocar

Nothing on this page can tell you whether your own vehicle is affected. Only its vehicle identification number can. The regulator runs a free lookup that takes a VIN and returns every unrepaired safety recall on that exact vehicle, with no account and no charge: the NHTSA recall lookup.

If it returns a recall, the repair is carried out free of charge. That obligation is not unlimited: it runs for fifteen years from the date the vehicle was first sold, but it covers almost every vehicle on the road. The campaign number, the code in the form 26V123 that identifies each campaign below, is the thing to quote when booking it.

The figures on this page describe the letter, not the repair. Autocar took a median of 57 days to write to owners after reporting a defect, and its slowest tenth of campaigns took 244 days or more. That is why a vehicle can be under recall for weeks before the person driving it has heard anything, and why the lookup is worth running even when no letter has arrived.

If you believe a vehicle has a safety defect that has not been recalled, the regulator takes reports from owners directly at nhtsa.gov. We are a company that reads and republishes the public register. We are not the regulator, and we cannot act on a complaint for you.

Check your car against what we hold · what to do if it is recalled.

Of 98 recalls, 89 took more than a month and 22 took more than three months. 3 reached owners before the report reached the regulator. Between them these campaigns cover 107,146 vehicles.

Its slowest recalls

How this was worked out

NHTSA publishes the whole American recall register as one flat file. Two of its columns are the date the defect report was received and the date the manufacturer notified owners. We read both, for every campaign, and subtract one from the other.

Medians rather than averages, because a single campaign notified years late would move an average somewhere meaningless. A recall with a date missing is excluded and counted, never filled in with a guess. Read on 9 September 2026 from the file itself.