Every used-car buyer asks the same question and gets the same shrug. "Will it last?" Nobody can tell you when. Until now we did not actually have a number to put on it either.
NHTSA's bulk complaint export includes a field most people never look at: the mileage on the odometer at the time the owner filed. About 58% of complaints in the federal record have a usable mileage value. On the high-volume failure clusters that adds up to hundreds — sometimes over a thousand — real odometer readings per failure mode. Enough to compute quartiles. Enough to say where the failures actually hit instead of guessing.
So we did. Here are ten widely-documented engine and transmission failures, sorted by when they show up on the odometer.
The early failures hit before the warranty is dry
The 2017 Honda CR-V with the 1.5L turbo is the clearest example of a modern problem nobody used to have. Median complaint mileage: 14,000 miles. A quarter of owners filed before 8,000. That is not a wear failure. That is a design problem showing up in normal use, well inside the factory warranty. The mechanism is documented — raw fuel slipping past the rings on short cold-weather trips, accumulating in the oil pan — and Honda has addressed it with software updates and revised service intervals. The data still shows what new owners experienced. The deeper write-up covers the regional pattern.
The Subaru Lineartronic CVT shows up early too, with a quarter of owners filing before 7,000 miles — though the sample is smaller (16 mileage-bearing complaints on that specific cluster) and the long tail to 71,000 is wider. Smaller-sample numbers like that are directional, not precise.
The classic 80–100k cluster
Most of the famous failures hit where mechanics have always said they hit. The 6F35 torque-converter shudder in a 2014 Escape: median 90,000. The Ford 5.4 Triton spark-plug ejection in a 2005 F-150: median 88,000. The Hyundai Theta II 2.4 in a 2013 Sonata: median 100,000. The Jatco CVT in a 2014 Altima: median 73,000. Nothing here will surprise a shop foreman. The value of seeing it on a chart is that it makes the timing concrete: the rule of thumb "100,000-mile risk window on these vehicles" turns into "actually about 70,000 to 125,000, depending on platform, and here is which one is which."
The Ford DPS6 PowerShift sits between the early and middle clusters — a 2013 Focus owner's median complaint mileage is 44,000 miles, with a quarter filing before 15,000. That early shoulder is the DPS6 signature: cars failing inside the warranty, repeatedly, which is what eventually drove the class action. Our DPS6-vs-6F35 deep-dive walks through why the same maker ended up with such different legal outcomes on two transmissions with comparable per-car failure rates.
What this chart does not tell you
It does not tell you the failure rate. We know how many owners filed and at what mileage, not how many vehicles never failed at all. The numbers describe the shape of the failure window, conditional on the failure happening. A vehicle line with twenty filings at a 100,000-mile median may have hundreds of thousands of identical vehicles still on the road that never broke.
It also does not adjust for filing bias. Mass-market brand owners file with NHTSA at higher rates than premium brand owners; cold-climate states file in different proportions than warm ones; particular online communities push owners toward filing more than others. The mileage numbers are the actual numbers in the federal record. They are not corrected for any of that, and we do not have the data to correct for it honestly.
And the mileage field itself is owner-entered. Some owners round. Some misremember. We filter out implausible values (under 1,000 or over 400,000) and compute quartiles, which absorb individual outliers, but the data is consumer reports of an odometer reading at the time of filing.
What it does tell you
If you are about to buy a vehicle on this list, the mileage on the odometer matters in a measurable way. A 2013 Hyundai Sonata at 60,000 miles is in front of the median Theta II failure. A 2013 Sonata at 110,000 has crossed it. That is not a guarantee — many cars never fail — but it is real information that did not exist on a public-facing chart before.
The per-vehicle pages on this site now carry the same window for every cluster that has enough data: "most failures cluster between X and Y miles, median around Z." That copy stayed dark on the pages until last week because the underlying mileage field was empty in our database. It is populated now.
How we did it
Source. NHTSA's FLAT_CMPL.zip flat-file export, joined on ODINO to the per-complaint records in our database. About 57.6% of the complaints we track carry a usable mileage value in the federal flat file; the public JSON sync API does not expose the field.
What we counted. For each cluster (vehicle × component category) we kept owner-reported mileages in the plausibility band 1,000 to 400,000 miles and computed Q1, median, and Q3 on the resulting array. The rows above were selected as widely-known failure modes with at least 50 mileage-bearing complaints per cluster, except for the Subaru CVT row (16 complaints, included as directional). Sample sizes are listed on each row of the chart.
Per-cluster windows for every indexed cluster on the site. 9,130 clusters have a statistically meaningful quartile read. They render on the individual problem pages as “most failures cluster between X and Y miles, median around Z.”