NHTSA Data Dive 3: 117 Models Ranked By Rate Of UA Incidents

And the data beat goes on. I asked Edmunds if they had updated model information to filter out the spike of UA reports to NHTSA after the 9/29/09 Toyota mat recall in order to improve my attempt at coming up with a model-specific UA rate. Not only did they oblige, but they already did all the work! A big hat tip to Edmunds, who has taken a lead in the quest to make sense of the data as well as the whole UA fiasco.

A note of explanation from Edmunds:

Attached are the UA complaints against sales by Model for MY2005-2010 and complaints received through 9/30/2009. A couple things to note about our “complaints per 100k sold” measure: if the model sales was less than 30k, then we excluded it from the list and if the model sales was between 30k and 100k, then we extrapolated the complaints to 100k.

Furthermore, I removed a few cars that had very low UA reports, generally less than four. But I left other in with low numbers because they were essentially “twins” of other models (Fusion/Milan), in order to test how reliable and consistent they are between the. I’m happy to see that generally that is the case: (Grand Cherokee: 7.57; Commander: 7.30); (Fusion 2.91; Milan 3.18) (Vibe 2.85; Matrix 2.75).

Obviously, the same question as to the Panther triplets comes up: they’re all high, but by varying degrees. And of course the biggest on is the discrepancy between the ES 350 (32.03) and the very similar Camry (6.52).

One more minor note: the Lexus LS 430 has an old-time bottom-hinged accelerator pedal, so mat entrapment is not an issue with it. And it hasn’t been implicated with a sticky pedal either. So in its case it must either be human error or…

Finally, the next step would of course to cross tabulate both sides of this chart to specific model years, since awe saw in our previous post how much variation there is from year to year. And then…