Which Used Cars Rack Up the Most 'Stalled While Driving' Complaints? We Counted the NHTSA Data

Key facts

• Recall (news hook): NHTSA campaign 26V547000 / Ford recall 26C40; 148,663 vehicles, 100% Ford Mustang, model years 2024–2026 (7th-gen S650), built at Flat Rock, MI between Sept 7, 2022 and June 9, 2026.
• Component: ELECTRICAL SYSTEM:WIRING — a wiring/ground-terminal defect, not an engine or piston failure.
• Defect: engine-compartment wiring-harness ground terminals can develop fatigue cracks from vibration and fracture; root cause per the Part 573 report is heat-shrink adhesive intruding into the ground-eyelet bolt-clearance area, bending the eyelet and raising bending stress.
• Consequence: depending on which ground fails, loss of drive/motive power while driving, or loss of headlights, washer, A/C, or cooling fan (cited as noncompliance with FMVSS 108 and FMVSS 104).
• Scope: NHTSA estimates ~1% of the population actually has the defect. Report received 2026-08-25; VINs searchable 2026-08-28; interim owner letters mailed ~Aug 31, 2026; remedy parts not available until ~March 2027.
• Our computation: 172,856 distinct stall/loss-of-power complaints = 10.7% of all NHTSA complaints; 48.7% carry the VEHICLE SPEED CONTROL component. The Mustang itself sits mid-pack at 8.8% stall-share — the recall is the freshness hook, not the finding.

Which used cars get the most "stalled while driving" complaints?

By raw volume, the leaderboard is dominated by high-sales, high-complaint nameplates. The Ford Escape (4,881 stall complaints), Ford F-150 (4,515) and Jeep Grand Cherokee (3,668) lead, with the Toyota Camry (3,506) and Ford Focus (3,190) close behind. These are counts of distinct consumer complaints across all model years, not confirmed defects and not a per-vehicle failure rate.

High raw volume partly tracks how many were sold, so we also computed a stall cut alongside our companion counts of which used cars have the most engine failure complaints and used cars with the most transmission problems — different failure classes that a raw-volume list alone would blur together. The Ford Focus, at #5 here, has its own history of stall recalls — one more reason used Ford Focus buyers should check the recall record before buying.

Does the leaderboard flip when you normalize it?

Yes, completely. When each model is ranked by its stall-share — the share of that model's own complaints that describe a stall — the high-volume nameplates drop away and a very different top ten appears, dominated by discontinued mid-2000s Ford, Volvo and Jeep models whose complaint files are disproportionately about the car losing power.

Two names survive both cuts and are the most defensible "robust to normalization" callouts: the Toyota Camry (top-4 by raw volume and 19.4% stall-share) and the Ford Escape (top raw and 18.0% share). Read the normalized list with care: it favors older, discontinued models with small, symptom-concentrated complaint files, and it is not registration-normalized — a reliable free per-100,000-registered denominator was not available, so this is each model's share of its own complaints, not stalls per vehicle on the road.

By the numbers

• 1,617,067 distinct NHTSA complaints processed (after ODINO dedup of 2,242,704 component rows).
• 172,856 stall / loss-of-motive-power complaints — 10.7% of the total.
• 84,195 of those (48.7%) carry the VEHICLE SPEED CONTROL component.
• Overlap: 33.5% are co-tagged ENGINE, 21.0% ELECTRICAL, 4.3% FUEL SYSTEM, and only 3.0% TRANSMISSION — confirming this cut is distinct from our transmission ranking and, because it keys on stall-while-driving narrative and excludes oil-consumption/teardown reports, distinct from the engine-share cut too.
• Ford Mustang: 804 stall / 9,176 total = 8.8% stall-share (mid-pack).

Based on 1,617,067 distinct NHTSA ODI complaints from the FLAT_CMPL flat file, retrieved 2026-09-05 (file timestamp 2026-09-04). Complaints are unverified consumer reports, not confirmed defects. Frozen rankings (411 models raw; 309 models by share) are linked in Sources.

Is the Mustang recall an engine failure? What the filing actually says

No. Early social chatter conflated it with engine or piston failure, but NHTSA campaign 26V547000 is coded ELECTRICAL SYSTEM:WIRING. Engine-compartment wiring-harness ground connections can develop fatigue cracks from repeated vibration and fracture; the Part 573 report attributes this to heat-shrink adhesive intruding into the ground-eyelet bolt-clearance area during assembly, bending the eyelet and raising bending stress. Depending on which ground fails, the driver can lose drive power while moving, or lose headlights, washer, A/C or the engine-cooling fan. The remedy replaces the ground terminals with redesigned stepped-neck standoff eyelet pigtails, free of charge — but remedy parts are not expected until around March 2027, so many affected Mustangs will show an open, un-remedied recall in the meantime. It is the same nameplate covered by earlier used Ford Mustang problems to check before buying.

What a VIN check can and can't tell you here

A VIN check is a screening tool, not a substitute for NHTSA and dealer confirmation. It is strongest on history — accidents, salvage, odometer, ownership and listings — and on flagging whether a recall exists at all. It cannot show you a car's stalling complaints or whether a recall was actually fixed.

To vet a used car for stalling risk: start with NHTSA's free VIN tool at nhtsa.gov/recalls for open recalls, read the NHTSA complaint database for that model and model-year, and get a pre-purchase inspection with a real test drive. A Zilocar VIN check fits alongside those as the history layer — it screens for recall presence and surfaces accident, salvage-auction, odometer, theft, ownership and listing history — while remedy status, investigations and firmware stay with NHTSA and the dealer.

Related checks

• which used cars have the most engine failure complaints
• used cars with the most transmission problems
• used ford focus problems to check before buying

Method

Source file. NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation Complaints flat file, FLAT_CMPL.txt, extracted from FLAT_CMPL.zip. The archive carries a file timestamp of 2026-09-04; we downloaded and processed it on 2026-09-05. NHTSA republishes this file continuously, so a later download will not reproduce these counts exactly — the frozen CSVs linked in Sources will.

Universe. · 2,242,704 complaint-component rows. The file stores one row per cited component, so a single owner report naming two systems appears twice. We deduplicate on ODINO (the owner-report id) to 1,617,067 distinct complaints, and every figure in this article is a count of distinct complaints, not of component rows, vehicles or owners.

Filter. A complaint enters the stall universe when either (a) field 12 (COMPDESC) begins with VEHICLE SPEED CONTROL, or (b) its free-text narrative (field 20, CDESCR) matches a stall/loss-of-power expression — stall, shut off/down, lost or loss of power, cut out, died, quit, power loss, no power — and is corroborated by motion wording (while driving, at speed, in traffic, on the highway, mph, moving). Narrative matches that are pure oil-consumption or engine-teardown reports with no motion wording are excluded. That yields 172,856 distinct stall complaints, 10.7% of the file, of which 84,195 (48.7%) carry the VEHICLE SPEED CONTROL component outright.

Cleanup and aggregation. Make and model strings are trimmed and upper-cased and grouped as a make + model pair; no other normalisation is applied. Two rankings are published: (1) raw stall-complaint count per nameplate, floored at 50 stall complaints (411 nameplates); (2) stall-share — stall complaints as a share of that nameplate's entire complaint history — floored at 800 total complaints and 40 stall complaints so that tiny-volume models cannot top the list on a handful of reports (309 nameplates). Both full tables are in the frozen CSVs.

The check most likely to reverse this, and its result. NHTSA's MODELTXT is a free-text label, so one vehicle can occupy several strings — and the Ford Escape leads the F-150 by only 366 complaints, so a split label could flip the headline. We ran a consolidation sweep across all 411 ranked nameplates, grouping every sub-variant into its base nameplate and checking model-year overlap. The top two do not change, and the Escape's lead widens from 366 to 577: Escape + Escape Hybrid/HEV/PHEV = 5,213; F-150 + F150 + Lightning BEV + Hybrid = 4,636. Below that the order does move — the Toyota Camry (+ Camry Hybrid/Solara = 3,935) rises from 4th to 3rd past the Jeep Grand Cherokee (+ 4xe/L = 3,756), and the Honda Accord (2,407) enters the top ten ahead of the Jeep Cherokee (2,285). We publish the unmerged table because the hybrid and plug-in variants overlap model years with their base nameplate, which makes them genuinely different powertrains rather than a renamed nameplate; punctuation-only aliases, which are true label splits, exist further down (Toyota 4RUNNER/4 RUNNER = 335 merged, Saab 9-5/95 = 122) but none rank near the top. The headline survives the check; ranks 3 through 10 are sensitive to the merge rule, and the deltas are stated here so anyone can re-rank either way.

Known limits. (1) NHTSA complaints are self-reported and unverified — they are not confirmed defects. (2) The file carries no sales or registration denominator, so nothing here is a per-vehicle failure rate; this is a ranking of complaint composition, and the share cut is each model's share of its own complaints, not stalls per car on the road. (3) The narrative regex is a screen, not a human read: no power and power loss can appear in non-drivetrain contexts such as power windows or accessory outlets, so 172,856 is approximate — the 84,195 component-tagged subset is the conservative floor, and both are published. (4) The share table structurally favours older, discontinued models whose complaint files are small and symptom-concentrated. (5) Complaint volume tracks how many cars were sold, how old they are, and how much press a defect received; a recall in the news inflates its model's counts. (6) Counts are distinct complaints, not vehicles or owners.

Sources

• NHTSA Part 573 Safety Recall Report — campaign 26V547000 (Ford 26C40), 2024–2026 Mustang wiring-harness ground fracture
• NHTSA Recalls API — campaign 26V547000 record (148,663 units, ELECTRICAL SYSTEM:WIRING, received 2026-08-25)
• NHTSA ODI consumer-complaint flat file FLAT_CMPL.zip — the primary dataset we downloaded and computed
• NHTSA recall lookup / VIN & campaign search (owner-facing remedy status)
• Frozen ranking (raw volume, 411 models): used-cars-stalling-loss-of-power-complaints-raw-nhtsa-2026-09-05.csv
• Frozen ranking (stall-share, 309 models): used-cars-stalling-loss-of-power-complaint-share-nhtsa-2026-09-05.csv
• CBS News / MoneyWatch — Ford recalls nearly 149,000 Mustangs over loss-of-drive-power risk
• Detroit News — Ford recalls 149,000 Mustangs over power loss

Last verified: 2026-09-05.