A car sold in forty countries is recalled by its manufacturer once. Each national authority then publishes its own notice, on its own timetable, and owners are written to when that country gets round to it. So for the same defect in the same car, owners in one country find out on one date and owners in another find out on a different one.
Nobody publishes that difference. Every register is national. Every cross-border comparison anyone has attempted is of wording. No regulator has any reason to measure how far behind another country’s citizens it left its own.
This page is one country pair (the United States and the Netherlands) and 60 recalls that both of them published. It is small, and it is the first time the two dates have been put side by side.
Read this before the numbers
Ford Nederland B.V. filed 36 of these 60 recalls, 60 per cent of the sample. That is not a coincidence and it is not a finding about that manufacturer. The two registers can only be joined where a maker prints its own campaign code in the American notice, and the makers who do that consistently end up being most of what can be compared at all.
So treat everything below as a study of the manufacturers organised enough to be traceable across borders, not as a comparison of two countries. 11 filers appear in total. A wider sample needs either more registers or a join that does not depend on the manufacturer volunteering its own reference, and both are real work rather than a setting.
What the two records show
Across the 60 recalls where both authorities record a date for writing to owners, American owners were told a median of 8 days after Dutch owners about the same defect.
- 24 where Dutch owners were told later.
- 34 where American owners were told later.
- 2 on the same day.
The size of the gap matters more than its direction. 31 of these recalls have more than a month between the two countries’ letters, 14 more than three months, and 8 more than six. For the length of that gap, one set of owners was driving a car the other set had already been warned about.
The widest gaps, in both directions
| Campaign | Filed by | US owners told | Dutch owners told | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25V274 · MGP250182 | Klintberg and Way Parts AB | 18 June 2025 | 31 May 2026 | 347 days later in NL |
| 21V537 · MGP220161 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 16 March 2022 | 13 December 2022 | 272 days later in NL |
| 25V572 · MGP250429 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 13 January 2026 | 15 June 2026 | 153 days later in NL |
| 25V093 · MGP250089 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 5 June 2025 | 28 October 2025 | 145 days later in NL |
| 26V124 · MGP260129 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 13 April 2026 | 8 June 2026 | 56 days later in NL |
| 25V164 · MGP250356 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 11 April 2025 | 3 June 2025 | 53 days later in NL |
| 18V169 · MGP180340 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 3 August 2018 | 24 September 2018 | 52 days later in NL |
| 25V442 · MGP250371 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 4 September 2025 | 15 October 2025 | 41 days later in NL |
| 25V025 · MGP250059 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 15 August 2025 | 24 March 2025 | 144 days later in US |
| 25V721 · MGP250420 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 28 April 2026 | 28 November 2025 | 151 days later in US |
| 26V091 · MGP250442 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 4 September 2026 | 28 November 2025 | 280 days later in US |
| 23V380 · MGP230240 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 3 May 2024 | 5 July 2023 | 303 days later in US |
| 25V455 · MGP250290 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 27 July 2026 | 30 August 2025 | 331 days later in US |
| 25V881 · MGP240197 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 12 February 2026 | 3 July 2024 | 589 days later in US |
| 25V441 · MGP230419 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 10 July 2025 | 20 November 2023 | 598 days later in US |
| 25V273 · MGP240003 | Ford Nederland B.V. | 8 October 2025 | 11 December 2023 | 667 days later in US |
How two notices are known to be the same recall
This is the hard part, and it is why the comparison has not been made before. The two registers share no identifier. Manufacturer names differ, model names differ, dates differ. Pairing on “same maker, about the same time” would pair things that merely happened at once.
So nothing here is paired that way. The join is on the manufacturer’s own campaign code, a field in the Netherlands vehicle register record, and a sentence buried in the American remedy text: “Ford’s number for this recall is 18S07.” Exact match only. That is strict enough to be trusted, and it is why this page covers dozens of recalls rather than thousands.
What this cannot tell you
- It is two countries, not the world. One pair, chosen because both publish enough to be joined at all.
- It covers only manufacturers who print their own code in the American notice. That is a self-selected set, and an unusually organised one. If anything, these are the makers you would expect to do best.
- The two dates are not the same administrative act. One register records when the American manufacturer notified owners; the other records the date the Dutch register holds for owner notification. Both come from the authorities themselves and neither is our estimate, but they are not interchangeable, and a gap of a few days should be read as noise.
- There is no percentage on this page that a reader could mistake for a national statistic, because 60 recalls cannot support one.
How this page is built
Of the 88 recalls matched across the two registers, 60 carry a notification date in both. 5 had no usable American notification date, 3 had none on the Dutch side, and 20 were flagged by the matching engine as needing review and dropped rather than quietly used. The American date is the one measured on the sixty-day page, so no two pages here can disagree about the same campaign.
The same fault, in both authorities’ words · Sixty days to tell you · What failed · Check your car