Three studies built from the register itself. Each states what it counted, where the figures came from, and the date they were read. All of it is free to cite and reuse with attribution.
The recalls that tell you to stop driving are mostly tiny
The gravest instruction a safety authority can give almost never applies to a mass-market car. What the stop-driving campaigns actually have in common, and why the pattern holds.
The over-the-air recall is arriving faster than the paperwork
A growing share of recalls are fixed by a software update sent to the car. The official record has not caught up with what that means for how a recall is counted, or for when it is finished.
How the world’s recall authorities handle a recall that grew
A recall covering forty thousand cars becomes one covering four hundred thousand. Different authorities treat that as a new notice, an amendment, or nothing at all, which is why cross-country comparison is harder than it looks.
These studies sat for weeks at URLs containing the word “trashed”, because the page that used to hold them was retired and its children inherited the path. The work was never the problem; the address was.
Every study on this site
Each of these is computed from the record this site keeps rather than from a press release, and each says on its own page what it counted and what it could not.
What happens to a notice after it is published
- Was your recall quietly rewritten?Every other recall checker answers whether your car is recalled. This one answers whether the fix has been rewritten since it was announced.
- Recall letters posted under wording that later changedThirty-seven letters went out describing a remedy the register has since altered. The owners were told the truth as it stood that week.
- The Softening IndexWhich manufacturers made a notice milder after publication, and which made one firmer. Softer and firmer are calls made by word lists, and the lists are published under the table.
- How often a recall gets filed againWhen a manufacturer changes what it told the regulator it files again, and the earlier report stays published. Nobody counts how often. Of the 1,440 most recent American campaigns, 42 per cent carry more than one filing.
- What changed after the Bolt battery recall was announcedOne recall where the earlier version can be shown beside the current one, because the manufacturer had to file again. The charge cap stopped being the remedy and became an interim measure.
- The recall that recalled a recallSometimes the repair does not hold and the same vehicles are called back a second time. The new notice says so, in a sentence, naming the recall it replaces.
How long it takes, and whether anyone is told
- How long before they tell youEvery recall has two dates: the day the manufacturer told the regulator, and the day it told the people driving the cars. This is the distance between them.
- Sixty days to tell youThe law does not leave the timing to the manufacturer. 49 CFR 577.7 requires the owner notification within sixty days. This is who meets it.
- Told before there was a fixA recall is not a repair. It is an announcement that a repair is owed, and sometimes the letter goes out because the law requires it while the part that would make the vehicle safe does not yet exist.
- How long a defect hidesA car is built. Some time later somebody admits there is something wrong with it. This is how long that gap runs.
- Sixty days later, still no letterThe law allows sixty days between filing a recall and writing to the owners. This is where every manufacturer stands against that deadline, and the notices where the letter is still not on record.
Whether the repair actually happens
- How many were actually fixedWhether the cars were ever repaired is published once a year, as a PDF, and as far as we can establish nobody turns it into data. So we did.
- Which faults actually get fixedThe same completion figures, read by the kind of fault rather than by the manufacturer. Some defects get repaired and some do not, and it is not random.
- The same part, recalled again and againA recall is meant to end something. These are the parts where it did not.
- Do not use it until we fix itBuried in a small number of notices is a single sentence addressed to the owner in the present tense, telling them to stop using a named part until the repair is done. Nobody had listed them, because the sentence is not a column.
The same defect, in more than one country
- Recalled somewhere else firstManufacturers are global and recalls are national. The same defect, on the same vehicle, reaches each register on its own timetable.
- Who gets told firstA car sold in forty countries is recalled by its manufacturer once. Each authority then publishes on its own schedule, and owners are written to when their country gets round to it.
- The same recall, two countries, two sizesTwo countries share a border and, for the most part, the same vehicles. When the same defect is recalled on both sides, are the two vehicle counts in proportion?
- Is the same defect described as seriously everywhere?The same Ford defect, the same manufacturer campaign code, described in one country as a loss of steering control and in another as something considerably calmer.
- What your register tells youEvery published comparison between countries is a comparison of volume. That is a fact about the car industry. The more useful fact is about the regulator.
- The French half of the recordTransport Canada publishes every recall twice, once in English and once in French, and has done for fifty years. Half of that record is almost never read.
What the words on a recall notice mean is not a study but it is the same habit: the register’s own vocabulary, explained one word at a time.
If you are a machine. The front door for an assistant is llms.txt: what is held, what may be called, and what this site will not claim. The endpoints are described in OpenAPI 3.1, and the Model Context Protocol server has a registry manifest. No key and no sign-up.