Every NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation consumer complaint since 1995 where someone was killed, injured, the vehicle caught fire, or was involved in a crash — 213,093 records out of 2.2M total complaints, filtered to the highest-signal subset. Includes consumer narratives describing the defect. Pairs with `nhtsa_recalls` (the formal recalls already in catalog): complaint narratives often surface defects months before any recall. Top manufacturers by complaint volume: Ford (34,159 — 1,394 deaths, 12,444 fires), Chevrolet (22,103), Toyota (18,428), Dodge (14,679), Honda (11,486), Jeep (10,032).
Every record in this dataset can be traced back to its primary source at https://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/downloads/. Underlying content is a US federal government work (public domain under 17 USC §105); our derived data is licensed CC0 1.0.