Chapter 1 · The lab test

A Five-Star Rating Is Less Distinctive Than It Sounds

NHTSA's 5-Star Safety Ratings were built to separate safer vehicles from the rest. Today they barely separate anything: of 2,097 rated new-vehicle variants (model years 2020-2026), 73% earn five stars and another 25% earn four. Nothing on the current books earns one star. The ratings still measure real performance in a controlled crash. They just no longer tell most buyers much about how one modern vehicle compares with another.

The people who built the program say the same thing. Joan Claybrook created the star ratings as NHTSA's administrator in the 1970s and later ran Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. Today she calls the program "a mere shell of its former self" and "nearly irrelevant," because automakers long ago learned to engineer cars to a test that has hardly changed since 2011. A 2021 report from Nader's Center for Study of Responsive Law reached the same conclusion: the ratings are "no longer a vibrant program challenging manufacturers to compete" and need "a drastic overhaul ... so consumers can truly differentiate." NHTSA proposed that overhaul in 2015; it did not finalize new ratings until 2024.

Chapter 2 · Counting the records

The Most Popular Vehicles Have the Most Complaints

But that doesn't make them the most dangerous

Georgia's most popular vehicles top the complaint and fatal-crash lists: the F-150, the Silverado, the Accord, the Camry. But volume alone does not indicate a problem; raw counts mostly track how many of each are on the road. Switch the measure to see which models draw more complaints from Georgia than expected.

The expected number comes from a simple baseline: Georgians filed 76,154 of the 2,190,543 complaints drivers nationwide have sent federal regulators: about 3.5%, or roughly 1 in 29. Mostly, that ratio measures where cars live, not where problems live: Atlanta's luxury-heavy market pushes BMW and Mercedes models above their national share, while Subarus, built for the Snow Belt, run far below it. So the second view sets a high bar: only models with 1,000 or more national complaints qualify. The names that rise there (the Hyundai Genesis, the Kia Optima, the Dodge Charger) are drawing outsized Georgia complaints on real volume, and they are worth asking about.

Chapter 3 · Design and age

Rollovers Are Less Common, but SUVs and Pickups Still Face Greater Risk

Which crashes turn into rollovers?

Electronic stability control has helped prevent rollovers, while stronger roofs have made them more survivable. But the risk has not disappeared.

Fifteen percent of vehicles involved in Georgia's fatal crashes rolled over. The rate rises with a vehicle's height and age. Among SUVs built before 2004, 36% rolled over. For SUVs built in 2011 or later, the rate fell to 13%. That's a major improvement, but still above the 10% rate for newer passenger cars.

Chapter 4 · A shared mechanism

Georgians Report Kia and Hyundai Fires at Twice the Expected Rate

Do repeated reports point to a common cause?

Nationwide, drivers have filed 5,087 fire complaints about Kia and Hyundai vehicles with federal safety regulators. That's the trail of the Theta II engine-fire defect that produced federal investigations, a $210 million consent order and one of the largest engine settlements on record. Georgians filed nearly double their expected share of fire complaints. Part of that is regional presence: Kia builds cars in West Point, Georgia, and both makes sell heavily in the Southeast, so Georgia files more Kia and Hyundai complaints of every kind. But even against Georgia's own Kia and Hyundai complaint volume, fire shows up about a third more often than it does nationally. Complaints are allegations, not verified defects. Laid out by model year below, they cluster exactly in the engine-era years federal investigators examined.

Chapter 5 · Check your vehicle

The Most Common Vehicle Complaints

Electrical and power-train complaints top the list

Georgia drivers have filed 76,154 vehicle-safety complaints with federal regulators since 2015, roughly 19 every day. Electrical systems, power trains and engines draw the most reports. Every one of those complaints is searchable here: look up any of 379 models, or browse the ranked views. Each ranking carries a minimum-sample floor, so a rare vehicle with two incidents never tops a list.

What the records show

Three Things to Carry Away

1. Crash-test stars are useful but no longer distinctive. They measure real performance in a controlled test, but with 98% of vehicles at four or five stars, the rating alone rarely tells you how one modern vehicle compares with another.
2. Raw incident totals mostly reflect how common a vehicle is. The vehicles at the top of Georgia's lists are the ones you see most on the road. A fair comparison needs a denominator, and this page is explicit about which ones exist and which do not.
3. Body type, age and repeated defect patterns can reveal what a single star rating cannot. Rollover risk tracks design and age; clustered complaints can point to a shared mechanism. Those are the signals worth investigating.

Notes

How This Was Built

How are these ratings and records assembled?

Keep investigating