PulsCar analysis of NHTSA public data, September 2026 Topic: vehicle air conditioning leaks, coverage documents and repair costs, 2015-2026 License: CC BY 4.0. Attribution: "PulsCar analysis of NHTSA public data, September 2026". SOURCE FILES ------------ NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation public flat files, downloaded September 2026 and loaded into a local SQLite database: FLAT_CMPL.txt - owner complaints. 777,040 rows, received 1 January 2015 - 8 September 2026. Field definitions: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/cmpl/CMPL.txt FLAT_TSBS.txt - manufacturer communications (service bulletins, dealer messages, owner notification letters, warranty and special-coverage bulletins). FLAT_RCL.txt - recall campaigns (searched; see note below). Complaint narratives are self-reported and are NOT a failure rate: there is no denominator, no verification of the diagnosis, and reporting volume is influenced by publicity around warranty extensions. Counts describe what owners wrote to NHTSA. COMPLAINT QUERY AND FILTERING ----------------------------- Step 1, full-text search: SELECT c.* FROM complaints c JOIN complaints_fts f ON f.rowid = c.rowid WHERE complaints_fts MATCH 'refrigerant OR freon OR condenser OR evaporator OR recharge OR "air conditioning" OR "air conditioner"'; -> 5,922 complaints. Step 2, keep only reports where an AC word sits within 120 characters of a cooling or leak symptom. AC words: (AIR ?CONDITION\w*|\bA/C\b|\bAC\b|REFRIGERANT|FREON|CONDENSER|EVAPORATOR|COMPRESSOR) Symptom words: (NOT COLD|NO COLD|NOT BLOW\w* COLD|BLOW\w* HOT|BLOW\w* WARM|WARM AIR|HOT AIR| STOPPED COOLING|NOT COOL\w*|QUIT COOLING|NO LONGER COOL|LEAK|RECHARG\w*| LOW ON REFRIGERANT|LOW REFRIGERANT|AC (STOPPED|FAILED|QUIT|DOESN'T WORK|NOT WORKING)| AIR CONDITION\w* (STOPPED|FAILED|QUIT|NOT WORKING|DOESN'T)) -> 1,880 complaints, received 2 January 2015 - 8 September 2026. This is the published set. SAMPLE READING -------------- 30 of the 1,880 drawn at random (Python random.seed(31), random.sample) and read in full: 23 - an AC cooling or leak problem is the subject of the complaint. 7 - the AC stopped as one symptom of a different failure: an ignition switch, a fuel pump, a power-steering failure, a body-control or wiring fault, a blower circuit. The 7 are not keyword errors - the air conditioning genuinely stopped working - so they were kept, and the 23% share is reported in the article as a finding rather than removed as noise. CONTEXT CATEGORIES (ac-complaints-by-context.csv) ------------------------------------------------- Narratives upper-cased and whitespace-normalized; categories are NOT exclusive. leak LEAK condenser CONDENS\w* recall/bulletin (RECALL|TSB|SERVICE BULLETIN|CAMPAIGN) warranty (WARRANT|GOODWILL|NO CHARGE|COVERED BY|EXTENDED COVERAGE) repeated (AGAIN|SECOND TIME|TWICE|3RD|THIRD TIME|MULTIPLE TIMES|RECURR) dollar figure \$\s?[\d,]{3,} evaporator (EVAPORATOR|EVAP CORE|EVAPORATER) compressor COMPRESSOR hose/seal (HOSE|\bLINE\b|O-?RING|SEAL\b|FITTING) recharge (RECHARG|REFILL|TOPPED OFF|ADD\w* FREON|ADD\w* REFRIGERANT|CHARGED THE) defrost (DEFROST|DEFOG|WINDSHIELD|VISIBILIT) heat as health (HEAT STROKE|CHILD|BABY|ELDER|MEDICAL|HEAT EXHAUST|100 DEGREE| 110 DEGREE|DANGEROUS HEAT) backorder (BACK ?ORDER|NOT AVAILABLE|UNAVAILABLE|NATIONWIDE SHORTAGE) dye/leak test (\bDYE\b|LEAK TEST|LEAK DETECT|UV LIGHT|SNIFFER) road debris (ROAD DEBRIS|\bROCK\b|STONE|PEBBLE) leak not found (COULDN'T FIND|CANNOT FIND|UNABLE TO FIND|NO LEAK (WAS |)FOUND| COULD NOT LOCATE|NOT ABLE TO FIND) Baselines over all 777,040 complaints: towed 5.11%, crash 4.37%, fire 1.82%. AC set: towed 20 (1.1%), fire 25 (1.3%), crash 6 (0.3%), injuries 21, deaths 0. MILEAGE ------- Values of 0, blank or 400,000 and above dropped. 972 of 1,880 rows remain. median 59,805 lower quartile 39,000 upper quartile 87,000 at or under 36,000: 218 at or under 60,000: 511 Per-model medians in ac-complaints-by-make-and-model.csv use the same rule; the mileage_values column gives the n behind each median. Makes with 10 or more complaints and make+model pairs with 12 or more are published, each with the counts of narratives naming a condenser, an evaporator, a compressor, a leak, and warranty. OWNER-REPORTED REPAIR FIGURES (ac-owner-reported-repair-costs.csv) ------------------------------------------------------------------ For each complaint, the first dollar amount between $75 and $6,000 whose surrounding 260-character window contains an AC word AND a cost word (COST|QUOTE|ESTIMATE|PAID|BILL|CHARGE|REPAIR|FIX|REPLACE), excluding windows naming a transmission, engine replacement, head gasket, purchase, loan, lease, airbag or timing job. One figure per complaint. Result: 242 figures, median $1,500, quartiles $600 and $2,000, range $100 - $5,900. Sixteen were read in full and fifteen were AC repair amounts. IMPORTANT: this is NOT a recharge price survey and must not be read as one. People do not file federal complaints about a $150 recharge that worked; they file about condensers, evaporators and compressors. The distribution is therefore skewed toward large repairs, and the article says so where it cites it. Figures span eleven years and are not inflation adjusted. The CSV carries amount, make, model and model year only - no narrative text. MANUFACTURER COMMUNICATIONS (ac-warranty-and-coverage-documents.csv) -------------------------------------------------------------------- SELECT t.* FROM tsbs t JOIN tsbs_fts f ON f.rowid = t.rowid WHERE tsbs_fts MATCH 'condenser OR refrigerant OR evaporator'; Rows are per make/model/year; collapsed to distinct (make, bulletin_no) pairs -> 1,004. Coverage documents are the subset whose summary contains an AC word (CONDENSER|EVAPORATOR|REFRIGERANT|A/C|AIR CONDITION) and one of: WARRANTY EXTENSION, EXTENDED WARRANTY, EXTENDS/EXTENDING THE WARRANTY, LIMITED WARRANTY EXTENSION, SPECIAL COVERAGE, SPECIAL POLICY, CUSTOMER SATISFACTION PROGRAM, PRODUCT UPDATE. -> 67 documents, published with make, number, NHTSA id, date, models and model years. The summary column is NHTSA's abstract truncated to 260 characters, not the bulletin text. The bulletin PDFs for the Honda, GM and Audi documents cited in the article were requested from static.nhtsa.gov and were not served for those document IDs; the article therefore quotes the federal file's own abstract and names it as such. RECALLS ------- The recall file was searched for condenser, refrigerant and air conditioning in the defect, consequence and remedy fields (69 campaigns). Almost none are about cooling: they are drain hoses wetting airbag modules, blower-motor and HVAC wiring fires, and compressor clutch bolts. No recall table is published for this topic because the finding is the absence: AC cooling failures are handled through warranty extensions and special coverage, not recalls. PRIMARY DOCUMENTS OPENED (September 2026) ----------------------------------------- 40 CFR 82.34 - Prohibitions and required practices (EPA Section 609) 40 CFR 82.154 - Sales restriction and the two-pound self-sealing-can exemption 40 CFR 84.54 - Technology Transitions restrictions, including (a)(13)(i) for Model Year 2025 light-duty passenger cars and trucks All three from the GovInfo 2024 CFR edition, title 40 volume 21. Note: eCFR.gov returned a CAPTCHA/anti-scraping page and was not used. LIMITATIONS ----------- 1. Complaint counts are not failure rates and must not be read as model reliability. 2. Keyword categories measure the words owners used, not what a technician found. 3. The per-model "which part leaked" split reflects what owners were told or believed; it is not an independent teardown. 4. Coverage documents change and are revised; the CSV is a snapshot of the federal file in September 2026. Verify by VIN with a franchised dealer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CASE SENSITIVITY — SECTION ADDED 19 SEPTEMBER 2026 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ NHTSA stores complaint narratives in ALL CAPS for records filed through roughly 2020 and in mixed case for records filed from 2021 on. A case-SENSITIVE search of the narrative field loses about 92% of the complaints filed after 2020, so this is the single largest way an analysis of this database can go wrong while still looking finished. Every query behind this file is case-insensitive, in two layers: * the complaint set is built with an FTS5 MATCH full-text search, which folds case before matching, so it cannot miss a mixed-case record; and * where the narrative is then tested with patterns, the narrative is upper-cased and whitespace-normalized first, so the patterns compare upper against upper. No query in this work uses GLOB or any case-sensitive comparison. This was not taken on trust. On 19 September 2026 every published folder was re-checked against the same database. Re-run here: the HVAC step-1 search reproduces its published count exactly.