Automobile Recalls And Repairs

On 2016-11-21 16:47:30

iSeeCars is an automotive data and research company that helps consumers find the best car deals by applying data analytics to analyze, score and rank automobiles. A recent study published by iSeeCars analyzed new vehicle sales and recall data from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) from January 1985 through September 2016.

They used this information to calculate three metrics:

Recall Rates demonstrates how often a manufacturer produces a vehicle with a defect relative to the number of cars they sell. An analysis of the last five years revealed that the industry average for recall rates has doubled. Porsche has the lowest “recall rate” and Volkswagen the highest.

Recall Rates

Recall Timeliness is an indication of how quickly an automaker identifies problems and initiates a recall. To assess timeliness, iSeeCars.com took the number of recall campaigns and compared them to the number of recalls within three years of their sale to determine how quickly automakers were issuing recalls. As an industry, manufacturers issued a recall within the first three years two-thirds (66.6%) of the time. GM has the best “recall timeliness” of the major automakers.

Recall Rates

Recall Proactiveness reflects the extent to which the vehicles recalled were initiated by the automaker or by an NHTSA investigation. While not all problems will be caught solely by the manufacturer, it does reflect the automaker’s proactiveness if a large proportion of its recalls were a result of NHTSA-initiated investigations over its own. Tesla earns the best “recall proactiveness” and Ford the worst.

Recall Rates

View the complete iSeeCars.com analysis here.