The Truth About NHTSA Complaints
Click to enrage … we mean, enlarge
According to the MSM and many on-line pundits, the NHTSA has been drowning in customer complaints about Toyotas for years. Supposedly, the warnings were thrown in the wind.
Edmunds went through the pain of sifting through NHTSA’s complaint database from 2001 through Feb. 3, 2010 . After the counting was done, Edmunds came to a startling conclusion: The deluge of complaints is a myth, to put it charitably. “Fabrication” would be a better word. Amongst 20 brands, “Toyota ranks 17th among automakers in the overall number of complaints per vehicle sold,” says Edmunds. NHTSA’s own data shows: Only drivers of Mercedes Benz, Porsches and Smarts have less to kvetch than Toyota owners.
According to the hard data, Land Rover owners complain the most about their vehicles. Much to the horror of Germany’s Autohaus, “inordinate amounts of complaints come from VW drivers.” Volkswagen ranks 4th in NHTSA’s hall of shame. Two days ago, Christian Wulff, Premier of Lower Saxony, 20 percent owner of Volkswagen, warned about Wolfsburg complacency: “The troubles of the competition should be a warning to undertake everything so that the same doesn’t happen to oneself.”
The most complaints in the database, 25.3 percent of the total, concern GM cars. Relativized by GM’s large market share, this lands GM on place 11. Ford, where quality is job one, gets more complaints per car than the cross-town rival. Chrysler, the other ward of the state, ranks 7th. Volvo, supposedly the pinnacle of safety, created even more complaints per car: Place 6.
Edmunds points out that these are raw “complaints filed by individuals.” The complaints are “not checked for accuracy by NHTSA.”
In the blood & guts dept., Edmunds tried to get hard numbers about deaths and injuries, but decided that it’s an exercise in futility. “It quickly became clear that the data is unreliable,” says the Edmunds press release. “For example, one complaint indicated that 99 people had died in one vehicle as a result of an accident. It should also be noted roughly 10 percent of total complaints appear to be duplicates.” Which may explain some of the confusion, and some of the wild numbers circulating with no dependable source.
“No one should overlook the issues raised by the Toyota recalls, but it is important to keep things in perspective,” said Edmunds’ CEO Jeremy Anwyl. “A broader view shows that consumer complaints reflect an industry issue, not just a Toyota issue. As Toyota’s experience in recent months clearly demonstrates, it is no longer an option for car companies to dismiss consumer complaints, even if the event is difficult to replicate or diagnose.” Looking at the list, car companies have their hands full.
Edmunds and NHTSA’s own data prove that there is a witch hunt and mass hysteria that are not born out by hard facts. Whether the witch hunt and mass hysteria have been created, or are just exploited by other interests, is left as an exercise to the student. Conspiracy theories? Henry Kissinger pointed out that even the paranoid have enemies. By the dubious virtue of being the world’s largest auto maker, Toyota has no shortage of enemies. And a lot of reason for paranoia.
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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Old Russian proverb, "Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They Aren’t Out to Get You". With this administration and the people they represent, assuming bad faith a priori will make you right more then 90% of the time.
Rather than fretting about the exact order of the manufacturers on that list, if you divide the number of complints by the market share then positions 3 to 19 out of the 20 fall in the range 1+/-0.5. I don't know what the statistical validity is of that table, but that seems to me to imply that there really isn't a lot in it, for most brands.