It’s 2023, but the 2022 year-end lists aren’t quite behind us. A handful of them can’t be compiled until the absolute last second of the year has passed. Among them, the automotive-quality naughty list.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has finalized its list of automotive safety recalls for 2022.
Ford Motor Company led all automakers with the most recall alerts in 2022. The blue oval notified owners to bring their vehicles in for an urgent safety repair 67 times last year. All told, 8,636,265 Ford-built vehicles got a recall notice.
What Is a Recall?
Modern cars are absurdly complex machines — thousands of parts, millions of lines of code, and often more than 100 microchips go into each. Americans use them daily, often for many years. The average car on American roads is now over 12 years old.
Problems, from minor software bugs to serious wear and tear, are inevitable in anything that complex and that heavily used. Annoying problems are often not the automaker’s responsibility once the car rolls off the sales lot. But safety issues are.
So prematurely peeling paint won’t trigger a legally-mandated recall, even if it affects every example of a car sold. But everything from fire risk to loose window trim that could fly off and hit another car will.
Federal law requires automakers to correct, for free, any problem that could make a car unsafe to use. They must notify owners and are still responsible for recall repairs even if you bought the car used. The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act mandates that automakers provide free repair on recall issues for 15 years from the date of sale, but most manufacturers will honor recalls even on older cars.
In particularly threatening cases, automakers may even ask drivers to stop using their cars until they’re fixed.
The List of Most Recalls
In 2022, Ford led the nation in both total number of recalls and total vehicles affected. Volkswagen Group came in second if you count by the number of recall campaigns (46), but Tesla picked up the silver for number of vehicles recalled (3,769,581).
The Top 10:
| Manufacturer | Number of Recalls | Number of Vehicles Recalled |
| Ford Motor Company | 67 | 8,636,265 |
| Volkswagen Group | 46 | 1,078,443 |
| Stellantis | 38 | 3,041,431 |
| Mercedes-Benz | 34 | 1,093,689 |
| General Motors | 32 | 3,371,302 |
| Kia | 24 | 1,458,962 |
| Hyundai | 22 | 1,452,101 |
| Tesla | 20 | 3,769,581 |
| BMW | 19 | 1,000,455 |
| Nissan | 15 | 1,568,385 |
A handful of smaller manufacturers got through the year with just one recall. But those recalls varied in severity. Ferrari, which sells about 8,000 cars most years, recalled several years’ worth of sales. Bugatti recalled one car. One.
The Nature of Recalls Is Changing
Tesla’s presence on the list – second in number of cars recalled, eighth in number of campaigns – highlights an interesting trend. A handful of its 20 recalls required owners to bring their cars in for service (a complicated notion for some Tesla owners). But many did not.
Today’s cars are more connected than ever before, and many recalls on internet-enabled cars can be fixed with a software update.
Federal law still requires automakers to notify owners of safety defects, even if they’re fixed remotely. But many Tesla owners – and increasingly, owners of cars from other manufacturers – simply received a notice that a problem with their car had been found and fixed remotely.
Automakers Ask Us To Relay This Message Over and Over
Our reporters are in touch with automakers every day, and the most consistent safety message automakers relayed to us over the years is simple: Please try to get your readers to bring their recalled cars in for repair.
“We don’t send out recall notices for fun,” one industry spokesperson recently reminded us. A 2015 study from the Alliance for Automotive Innovation – a major industry trade group – found that just 64% of people who receive a recall notice actually get their car repaired.
It should go without saying, but it doesn’t – safety defects can be deadly. Last year, at least one driver died after ignoring more than 100 notices begging them to bring their car in for a free repair that would likely have saved them.
While automakers try to reach every owner to ask them to bring the vehicle in for repair, they rarely reach them all. Millions of vehicles on American roads need free recall repairs. Check the easy VIN tool at our recall center to find out if your car is one of them.
