Used Cars With the Most Transmission-Failure Complaints? We Counted the NHTSA Data

Key facts

• Dataset: NHTSA ODI Complaints flat file (FLAT_CMPL), file dated 2026-08-26, processed 2026-08-27. Total records: 2,238,913. Transmission universe (COMPDESC exactly POWER TRAIN or containing TRANSMISSION): 201,869 rows = 9.02% of all complaints, across 2,876 nameplates and model years 1964-2027.
• The label split matters: 67.6% of transmission complaints sit in the generic POWER TRAIN bucket, only 32.4% carry an explicit TRANSMISSION sub-label. A strict "transmission"-only search undercounts real transmission trouble roughly 10x on cars like the Focus.
• The number is an upper bound, and we tested it: reading the free-text narrative of all 201,869 records, 145,821 (72.2%) actually describe a transmission symptom — 6.51% of all complaints. Treat 201,869 as the power-train universe and 145,821 as the transmission floor. The leaderboard barely moves either way (see Method).
• Raw top three (all model years): Ford F-150 8,616; Ford Focus 6,625; Jeep Cherokee 5,442.
• The order reverses on exposure: the F-150 is the best-selling US vehicle; transmission is only 18% of its own complaints and it falls to roughly 21st by share.
• Named defects: Ford DPS6 "PowerShift" dry dual-clutch (2011-2016 Focus/Fiesta); Jeep ZF 9-speed 948TE (2014-2015 Cherokee), ~505,000-vehicle FCA recall; Nissan Jatco CVT (2013-2018 Altima/Sentra/Rogue/Pathfinder/Maxima), $277.7M settlement; Honda V6 5-speed recall 04V176000 (~499,000-600,000 units).
• What a VIN check proves here: recall presence plus accident, salvage-auction, odometer, theft, ownership and listing history — not whether a recall or software reflash was completed.

Which used cars have the most transmission-failure complaints?

By raw complaint count, the Ford F-150, Ford Focus and Jeep Cherokee top NHTSA's transmission data, followed by the Ford Explorer, Ford Escape and Jeep Grand Cherokee. Ford holds seven of the raw top fifteen nameplates. But this ranking mixes two very different signals — genuine defect patterns and simple sales volume — so it should be read alongside the exposure-adjusted cut below.

Does a high complaint count mean the car is bad, or just that it sold in huge numbers?

Usually it means volume. We tested "most" against all 2,876 nameplates two ways, and the best-sellers do not survive either test. Ranked by transmission share — transmission complaints as a percentage of that model's entire complaint history, minimum 300 transmission rows — the leaders are Mercury Monterey 63%, Ford Freestar 57%, Mazda 626 52%, Lexus RX300 51%, Toyota C-HR 48%, Acura CL 45%, Ford Fiesta 34%, Fiat 500 34%, Nissan Maxima 28% and Suzuki Forenza 27%. None of the raw top four except the Focus and Cherokee appear here; the F-150 drops from #1 to about 21st. This is the fleet-age confound at work, the same reason at what mileage do cars start having problems has to be read as a cohort rather than a raw tally.

Fixing the model year removes the confound entirely. Within MY2014 only, the transmission ranking is: 1) Ford Focus 1,541; 2) Jeep Cherokee 1,458; 3) Ford Escape 483; 4) Jeep Grand Cherokee 471; 5) Ford F-150 420. The modern used-car transmission story is the Focus PowerShift and Cherokee 9-speed — not the raw-count trucks.

Is the Ford Focus and Fiesta PowerShift transmission safe to buy used?

The Ford DPS6 "PowerShift" dry dual-clutch six-speed automatic is the most complaint-heavy modern used-car transmission in the data, and buyers most commonly avoid it or budget for repair. It appeared in 2011-2016 Focus and Fiesta (with later suits reaching 2017-2019 Fiesta and 2017-2018 Focus), producing shudder, slipping, hesitation and clutch or control-module failures. Multiple class actions followed; one settlement covered roughly 1.5 million current and about 400,000 former owners. The generic-label effect is starkest here: the Focus shows 6,864 power-train-family complaints, of which only 582 carry an explicit "transmission" label and 6,043 are bare "POWER TRAIN" — which is why we count both. For the broader Ford picture, see our checks on used ford explorer transmission problems to check before buying.

Are Nissan CVT and Jeep 9-speed transmissions a used-car risk?

Both are repeat names in the data with documented, litigated defects. Nissan's Jatco CVT draws shudder, overheating and judder reports across the 2013-2016 Altima, 2013-2017 Sentra/Versa and 2014-2018 Rogue, Pathfinder, Murano, Maxima and Infiniti QX60; one case settled for $277.7 million and Nissan extended the CVT warranty from 60 months/60,000 miles to 84 months/84,000 miles on covered cars. The 2014-2015 Jeep Cherokee ranks third by raw count on its first-year ZF 9-speed (948TE) — harsh shifts, unintended shifts to neutral and stalls. FCA recalled about 505,000 vehicles in August 2016 with a software remedy (ZF and FCA position the fault as software, not mechanical), covering the 2014-2015 Cherokee, 2015 Renegade, 2015 Chrysler 200 and 2015 ProMaster City.

Which trucks draw the most transmission complaints?

Among trucks, the Ford F-150 leads on raw count (8,616), followed by the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 (2,358) and Dodge Ram 1500 (2,160) — but truck rankings are the most distorted by volume and by data quirks. The F-150 and Silverado are two of the best-selling vehicles in the country, so their high totals partly reflect the millions on the road; transmission is only 18% of the F-150's complaints and 10% of the Silverado's. Ram trucks are also fragmented across the makes DODGE (pre-2010) and RAM (2011+) and across the model strings RAM 1500 and 1500, so a merged Ram total would rank higher than the 15th-place figure shown. For the truck-specific pattern, our used ford f-150 transmission problems to check before buying breakdown covers the 2015-2017 years most cited.

By the numbers

• 2,238,913 — total NHTSA complaint-component records processed (file dated 2026-08-26).
• 201,869 (9.02%) — records citing the transmission or power train.
• 136,373 (67.6%) vs 65,496 (32.4%) — bare POWER TRAIN label vs explicit TRANSMISSION label.
• 2,876 — make+model nameplates ranked; 269 makes; model years 1964-2027.
• 145,821 (6.51%) — narrative-confirmed transmission records, the conservative floor under the 201,869 power-train universe.
• Top-10 by share: Mercury Monterey 63.3%, Ford Freestar 57.3%, Mazda 626 51.8%, Lexus RX300 50.8%, Toyota C-HR 48.1%, Acura CL 44.9%, Ford Fiesta 34.2%, Fiat 500 33.9%, Nissan Maxima 27.5%, Suzuki Forenza 26.8%.
• Modern used cars (MY2012-2019), top five: Ford Focus 6,038; Ford F-150 5,627; Jeep Cherokee 4,787; Ford Escape 2,341; Ford Fusion 1,608.
• Validation: for the Ford Focus MY2014 cohort, the live NHTSA API returns 1,129 POWER TRAIN complaints against our 1,541 broad flat-file rows — consistent, because the flat file stores one row per cited component.

Based on 201,869 transmission-related records within 2,238,913 NHTSA ODI complaint-component records, FLAT_CMPL file dated 2026-08-26, retrieved and processed 2026-08-27. Full ranked CSV linked in Sources. The same counting method underlies our companion analysis of which used cars have the most engine failure complaints, where the exposure adjustment reshuffles the leaderboard the same way.

Why this is in the news now

Two durability stories put the "will the expensive stuff break after I buy it" question back at the center of used-car shopping this week. Ford recalled 288,314 vehicles in August 2026 (roof-rail covers) amid a record recall load, and NHTSA opened Engineering Analysis EA26005 on 2026-08-20 covering 997,743 GM vehicles with the 6.2L L87 V8 after 690 new failure incidents beyond the original recall. Both are engine stories, not transmission ones — they frame the anxiety, not our data. Transmissions are the failure buyers most fear because they are among the most expensive to replace, and unlike a recall they usually surface as a model-level pattern first, then on your test drive.

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

A Zilocar VIN check helps you screen the individual car around a transmission-trouble model, but it does not certify the transmission itself. Transmission failure shows up as a documented pattern at the model and model-year level — this ranking — before it shows on a test drive; a VIN check then tells you what has happened to that specific car.

For remedy status, use NHTSA's free VIN recall lookup or a franchised dealer — that is the authoritative source for whether a specific campaign was completed.

If you are weighing a Focus, Fiesta, Cherokee or a Nissan CVT car, a Zilocar VIN check screens whether that exact vehicle is named in an open recall and surfaces its accident, salvage-auction, odometer, theft, ownership and sales-listing history — a fast way to spot a car quietly flipped soon after a transmission repair. Confirm the remedy itself at NHTSA or a dealer; treat the VIN report as history and recall screening, not a repair guarantee.

Related checks

• which used cars have the most engine failure complaints
• which used cars have the most brake failure complaints
• which used cars have the most backup camera failure complaints

Method

Source file. NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation Complaints flat file, FLAT_CMPL.txt extracted from FLAT_CMPL.zip. The archived file is dated 2026-08-26; we downloaded and processed it on 2026-08-27. NHTSA republishes this file continuously, so a later download will not reproduce these counts exactly — the frozen copy linked in Sources will.

Universe. · 2,238,913 complaint-component rows, model years 1964-2027. The file stores one row per cited component, so a single owner complaint naming two systems appears twice; every figure here is a count of records, not of people.

Filter. A record enters the transmission universe when field 12 (COMPDESC) is exactly POWER TRAIN or contains the string TRANSMISSION. That yields 201,869 records, 9.02% of the file, spread across 2,876 make+model nameplates and 269 makes.

Cleanup and dedup. Make and model strings are trimmed and upper-cased, then grouped as a make + model pair; no other normalisation is applied. Nothing is dropped for low counts — all 2,876 nameplates are in the frozen CSV. No de-duplication is performed across ODINO (the owner-report id), because the component-row grain is the unit NHTSA publishes and collapsing it would silently discard multi-system complaints.

Aggregation. Three rankings: (1) raw transmission-record count per nameplate; (2) transmission records as a share of that nameplate's entire complaint history, restricted to nameplates with at least 300 transmission records so that tiny-volume models cannot top the list on a handful of reports; (3) a fixed model-year cohort (MY2014) that holds fleet age constant.

The check most likely to reverse this, and its result. Two-thirds of the universe (67.6%) carries only the generic POWER TRAIN label, which NHTSA also uses for engine and driveline complaints — so the 201,869 figure could be an engine ranking wearing a transmission headline. We tested it by reading the free-text narrative (CDESCR, field 20) of all 201,869 records and keeping only those containing a transmission keyword (transmission, gearbox, shift, clutch, CVT, torque converter, gears, slipping, limp mode, park, neutral). 145,821 records — 72.2% of the universe, 6.51% of the whole file — survive. Of the generic POWER TRAIN rows alone, 65.3% mention a transmission symptom, 11.5% mention only engine terms and 23.2% neither. The ranking is substantially unchanged: the top two (Ford F-150, Ford Focus) hold, the Jeep Cherokee moves from 3rd to 4th behind the Ford Explorer, and nine of the broad top ten remain in the strict top ten. On the exposure-adjusted cut the top six by share are the same models in near-identical order, and the F-150 sits at 24th instead of about 21st. The finding survives; the headline number does not survive as a pure transmission count. Both columns are published in the frozen CSV so anyone can re-rank on either basis.

Known limits. (1) NHTSA complaints are self-reported and unverified, and complaint volume tracks how many cars are on the road, how old they are and how much press a defect got — this is a ranking of complaint composition, not of failure risk per vehicle. (2) There is no sales denominator in the file, which is why the share and fixed-cohort cuts exist. (3) Nameplates fragment across makes and model strings — Ram trucks split between DODGE/RAM and RAM 1500/1500, so a merged Ram total would rank higher than shown. (4) The narrative keyword filter is a screen, not a human read: park and neutral in particular can appear in non-transmission contexts, so 145,821 is itself approximate. (5) Counts are records, not vehicles or owners.

Sources

• NHTSA ODI Complaints flat file (FLAT_CMPL.zip) — the primary dataset we downloaded and ranked (file dated 2026-08-26, retrieved 2026-08-27; 2,238,913 records).
• NHTSA Datasets and APIs — flat-file documentation and download hub.
• NHTSA Complaints API — complaintsByVehicle (Ford Focus MY2014) — used to validate the flat-file counts.
• Frozen ranked CSV — transmission complaints by model (2026-08-27)
• American Honda — voluntary V6 5-speed automatic transmission recall — basis of recall 04V176000.
• Fiat Chrysler recalls ~505K vehicles over ZF 9-speed (948TE)
• Ford DPS6 PowerShift dual-clutch class action
• Nissan Jatco CVT — $277.7M class action settlement
• Ford recalls 288,314 vehicles (Aug 2026 news peg)
• NHTSA ODI resume — GM L87 engine probe (EA26005 context)

Last verified: 2026-08-27