Car recalls by brand, from NHTSA’s recall file
Ford filed 572 vehicle recall campaigns with NHTSA from 2016 to 2025, the most of the 18 brands below; Chrysler filed 67. Pick a brand to see its year-by-year record.
Every safety recall in the United States starts with a defect report the manufacturer files with NHTSA under 49 CFR Part 573, and every report becomes a numbered campaign in a public file that NHTSA republishes each day. We read that file every week and count, for the 18 brands with the largest US sales, the vehicle campaigns received each year since 2016, the units the makers declared as potentially affected, the component groups involved and the campaigns carrying a do-not-drive or park-outside warning. The counts are by campaign, not by vehicle: one campaign can cover a single model built in one week or millions of trucks over a decade. A campaign shared by sister brands (Chevrolet and GMC, Jeep and Ram) counts for each brand it names. This build reads the file dated October 15, 2026; its latest campaign was received on October 9, 2026.
Ford: campaigns filed with NHTSA per year
- 201633
- 201738
- 201832
- 201963
- 202039
- 202152
- 202263
- 202357
- 202460
- 2025135
- 2026*75
Most recalled systems: power train (101), electrical system (84), back over prevention (47).
* 2026 runs to the latest campaign in NHTSA's file.
What the brand totals measure, and what they do not
A brand with more campaigns is not automatically a brand with worse cars. Three things push the count up. The first is the size of the lineup: a maker selling dozens of models, with heavy-duty trucks and commercial vans, opens more campaigns than one selling five. The second is how finely a maker splits its filings: some file one campaign per model, others one campaign for a whole platform. The third is reporting culture, since NHTSA has repeatedly fined manufacturers for late filings, and a maker that files quickly and often looks worse in a raw count than one that waits. Ford heads the table for all three reasons at once.
What the count does show reliably is direction. Ford went from 52 campaigns in 2021 to 135 in 2025, the largest rise of the group. Software has become a recall category of its own, and rearview camera faults alone account for 61 campaigns across all makes in 2025.
Units covered: the second number to look at
Each campaign carries the potentially affected population the maker declared. That figure decides how likely your own car is concerned. Summed over a year, it can exceed a brand's sales, because a vehicle can be in several campaigns and because older model years are recalled long after they were sold. Use it to compare scale, not to estimate a percentage of cars with problems.
From a brand to your car
The brand pages narrow things down: each opens on a recall lookup set to that brand, then lists its campaigns per year, its most recalled systems and the models named in the most campaigns since 2021. From there, the recall check gives the campaigns for any model year, and the VIN decoder does the same from the 17 characters. The status of one specific vehicle, repaired or not, stays on NHTSA’s VIN lookup.