The European alerts

Twenty-seven countries share one alert system. When a car is found dangerous anywhere in the European Union, the member state that found it raises an alert in the Safety Gate and every other country sees it. The record says which country raised it, a field no other register on this site has.

So the obvious question, which nobody publishes: do the twenty-seven use it equally?

Which country raised the alert

6,396 motor-vehicle alerts. This is a count of who filed, not of where the danger was: an alert raised by one country is seen by the whole union.

Notifying country	Alerts raised	Share
Germany	3,305	52%
France	777	12%
Portugal	517	8%
Greece	471	7%
United Kingdom	405	6%
Poland	211	3%
Spain	170	3%
Belgium	92	1%
Ireland	76	1%
Austria	57	1%
Italy	56	1%
Malta	46	1%
Romania	29	0%
Sweden	28	0%
Bulgaria	26	0%
Luxembourg	24	0%
Finland	20	0%
Hungary	18	0%
The Netherlands	16	0%
Slovakia	15	0%
United Kingdom in respect of Northern Ireland	9	0%
Czechia	8	0%
Norway	5	0%
Lithuania	5	0%
Cyprus	3	0%
Denmark	3	0%
Estonia	2	0%
Liechtenstein	1	0%
Slovenia	1	0%

Germany and France account for 64 per cent of every motor-vehicle alert in the union. 29 countries appear at all, out of twenty-seven.

A country that raises few alerts is not a country with safer cars. It may inspect less, or report through its national register instead, or leave it to the member state where the manufacturer is based. What this table shows is who uses the shared system, and that a system built for twenty-seven is in practice being carried by two.

What the danger was

Risk named	Alerts
Injuries	5,278
Fire	1,206
Environment	127
Burns	63
Chemical	23
Electric shock	15
Cuts	5
Security	4
Health risk / other	3
Suffocation	2
Damage to hearing	2
Asphyxiation	2

The European record names the risk in its own field (injuries, fire, burns) rather than leaving a reader to infer it from a description of the part. Two of the four national registers we read do not do that at all, which is set out on what your register tells you.

Which makes appear most

Brand	Alerts
Mercedes-Benz	586
Peugeot	283
BMW	222
Ford	214
Toyota	196
Renault	192
Opel	188
VW	178
Honda	169
CITROEN	142
not stated	138
Audi	125
Nissan	117
Fiat	117
Volvo	107
Evobus	97
Land Rover	95
Hyundai	90
Suzuki	86
Jeep	84

A brand near the top of this table is usually there because it sells more cars, not because it builds worse ones. There is no vehicle count in the European record and therefore no denominator, so this is a count of notices and nothing more. We are not going to build a rate out of a number with no bottom half.

The field that lets these join the American record

2,693 of the 6,396 alerts carry the manufacturer’s own recall code, the same field that lets a Dutch notice be tied to an American one on who gets told first. A European-to-American comparison is therefore possible by exactly the same strict rule: the maker’s own code, exact match, nothing paired on brand and date.

That join is built: Europe and America sets the two publication dates against each other for every campaign whose code appears in both registers.

How this data got here, which you should know before you use it

The Safety Gate publishes every weekly report as XML, openly, with no key and no licence barrier. This site’s server cannot read it.

That is established rather than assumed. Nine request variants were tried: Accept headers, HTTP/1.0 and 1.1, browser and bot user agents, TLS pinned to 1.2 and to 1.3, certificate verification off, and a byte-range request. Every one failed identically. Meanwhile the Commission’s own root page answers this server normally, and a deliberately malformed Safety Gate request comes back as a clean error. The handshake succeeds; small responses arrive; anything carrying real data is cut mid-transfer. That is bot protection refusing this machine’s address.

The data is public. The obstacle is that this particular server is not allowed to ask for it. So the asking is done from an address that is allowed: a small program on Cloudflare’s network which fetches those two Safety Gate endpoints and nothing else, and passes the bytes back without altering one of them. This site reads it on its own clock. Every row keeps the weekly report it came from and a link to the Commission’s own page for that alert, so nothing here has to be taken on trust. Every line can be checked at the source.

It is no longer a snapshot. Last read 11 September 2026. The Commission publishes a weekly report every Friday, and this site looks for new ones on its own clock rather than waiting to be fed. 1,114 of the 1,115 weekly reports published since 2005 have been read. The rest are being worked through newest first, so the recent record is complete and the older one is still filling in. The figure is printed here rather than left for a reader to assume.

Coverage by year of weekly report: 2005 (57); 2006 (109); 2007 (201); 2008 (166); 2009 (142); 2010 (178); 2011 (172); 2012 (146); 2013 (165); 2014 (198); 2015 (240); 2016 (408); 2017 (437); 2018 (419); 2019 (509); 2020 (482); 2021 (549); 2022 (341); 2023 (395); 2024 (370); 2025 (447); 2026 (265).

Source: European Commission, Safety Gate rapid alert system. The alerts are the Commission’s; the counting, the grouping and any mistake in them are ours, and go on the corrections page. The whole set is available as one JSON file.

What your register tells you · Who gets told first · What changed after publication · Check your car