A recall is not a repair. It is an announcement that a repair is owed, and the two do not always arrive on the same day. Sometimes the letter goes out because the law requires it, and the part that would make the vehicle safe has not been made yet.
The manufacturer writes that down, in its own words, in the corrective action text the American regulator publishes with every campaign.
Toyota plans to mail an interim owner notification in the middle of January 2011, to advise owners of the recall. A second letter will be mailed when parts are available.
Two letters. The first one tells you your vehicle has a defect and there is nothing you can do about it. Nobody counts them, because it is a sentence rather than a field.
How often it happens
Of the 13,599 vehicle recall campaigns in the American register since 2010, 412 say in their own text that the owner was written to before a fix existed. That is 3% of all campaigns, and it covers 66,793,662 vehicles.
That total is a sum across campaigns and not a count of distinct vehicles: a car recalled twice this way is counted twice, and this site will not pretend otherwise. It is still tens of millions of letters that could not say when the problem would be dealt with.
2026 is already the worst year on the record
| Year the defect was reported | Campaigns with no fix at the time |
|---|---|
| 2010 | 5 |
| 2011 | 11 |
| 2012 | 12 |
| 2013 | 15 |
| 2014 | 32 |
| 2015 | 23 |
| 2016 | 36 |
| 2017 | 23 |
| 2018 | 37 |
| 2019 | 44 |
| 2020 | 34 |
| 2021 | 26 |
| 2022 | 8 |
| 2023 | 14 |
| 2024 | 18 |
| 2025 | 22 |
| 2026 | 52 |
The year is not finished and it already holds more of these than any complete year in the file.
One caution, because it cuts the other way. A manufacturer can rewrite its corrective action text once the remedy exists, and an older campaign is more likely to have been rewritten than a recent one. Some of the slope above may be that rather than a change in behaviour. The file gives no way to tell, so the page says so instead of claiming a trend it cannot prove.
Who does it most
Counted by campaign, not by vehicle, so a small maker with many campaigns can sit above a large one with few.
| Make | Campaigns |
|---|---|
| FORD | 49 |
| THOMAS BUILT BUSES | 36 |
| FREIGHTLINER | 23 |
| MERCEDES-BENZ | 22 |
| JEEP | 16 |
| CHEVROLET | 12 |
| HONDA | 11 |
| HYUNDAI | 11 |
| TOYOTA | 10 |
| AUTOCAR | 10 |
| BMW | 9 |
| RAM | 8 |
Two of the first four are heavy truck and bus builders. That is worth noticing: a school bus or a tractor unit is not parked while its owner waits, it is worked, and the interim letter is the only thing standing between the defect and the road.
The largest of them
| Campaign | Make | Reported | Vehicles |
|---|---|---|---|
| 21V050000 | GMC | 2021-02-05 | 2,641,272 |
| 14V252000 | CHEVROLET | 2014-05-14 | 2,440,524 |
| 14V047000 | CHEVROLET | 2014-02-10 | 2,190,934 |
| 16V384000 | FORD | 2016-05-31 | 1,892,343 |
| 21V054000 | CADILLAC | 2021-02-05 | 1,778,128 |
| 16V340000 | LEXUS | 2016-05-23 | 1,754,517 |
| 23V652000 | KIA | 2023-09-25 | 1,730,192 |
| 14V168000 | TOYOTA | 2014-04-09 | 1,486,413 |
| 25V695000 | FORD | 2025-10-13 | 1,448,655 |
| 16V668000 | JEEP | 2016-09-15 | 1,435,625 |
The watchlist, and what it is not
62 campaigns, covering 14,656,781 vehicles, still carry text saying in the present tense that parts or a remedy are not available.
That is not a list of recalls that are open today, and we will not present it as one. The bulk file holds text, not state. A manufacturer that finally ships the part is under no obligation to go back and rewrite the sentence, and the oldest entry on this list was reported in 2010. A dry run over the file is what showed that, before any of this was published.
So it is a watchlist. Every campaign on it now carries the day this site first saw it there, which is the only history a snapshot can honestly produce, and it starts today. In a year this page will be able to say something the file cannot say now.
| Campaign | Make | Reported | Vehicles | The phrase that matched |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10V620000 | TOYOTA | 2010-12-13 | 94,126 | when parts are available |
| 12V222000 | HONDA | 2012-05-17 | 625,762 | parts are not yet available |
| 12V406000 | ISUZU | 2012-08-16 | 278,174 | when parts are available |
| 13V114000 | KIA | 2013-04-01 | 980,377 | when parts are available |
| 13V383000 | LEXUS | 2013-08-28 | 780,584 | when parts are available |
| 13V405000 | SUZUKI | 2013-09-06 | 189,901 | parts are not currently available |
| 13V429000 | TOYOTA | 2013-09-26 | 614,722 | when parts are available |
| 13V564000 | BMW | 2013-11-12 | 76,565 | parts are not currently available |
| 14V153000 | SATURN | 2014-03-31 | 1,373,177 | parts are not currently available |
| 14V151000 | CHEVROLET | 2014-03-31 | 174,046 | when parts are available |
| 14V266000 | BUICK | 2014-05-20 | 1,339,355 | parts are not currently available |
| 14V404000 | BUICK | 2014-07-02 | 184,611 | when parts are available |
The whole list is at the status route, with the manufacturer’s sentence beside each one.
How this was counted
Every line of NHTSA’s bulk recall file is read. Vehicle campaigns only: equipment recalls are a different population and mixing them inflates every figure. A campaign counts when its corrective action text contains one of a published list of phrases, matched from the start of a word.
The study was chosen under a different name. It was going to be the wait for a fix that does not exist, and the dry run killed that sentence: the median gap between the report date and today, across campaigns whose text still says no remedy, came out at nearly ten years. Ten years is not a wait, it is a sentence nobody went back to edit. The measurement the file actually supports is the one above.
What this cannot tell you
- It counts manufacturers’ words, not a regulator’s field. A campaign that handled the same situation in different language is not here.
- Vehicle counts are sums across campaigns, not distinct vehicles.
- It is the American register only, and only from 2010.
- It is not advice. If your vehicle is under recall, the letter you were sent and your dealer are the authority, not this page.
Where this comes from
- NHTSA, the flat recall file, vehicle campaigns since 2010, read in full rather than sampled.
- The engine publishes itself, with every phrase it searches for and the whole watchlist, at its status route.
- The filings belong to NHTSA. The reading, the counting and any mistake in them are ours.
Built 8 September 2026. Corrections go on the corrections page.
Do not use it until we fix it · How long a defect hides · When the repair did not hold · The data · How we work
Sixty days later, still no letter — the same sixty days, counted forward instead of back: 175 notices filed in the last three years where the deadline has passed and the record still carries no date for the letter, listed by manufacturer.