PulsCar analysis of NHTSA public data, September 2026 Topic: fuel injectors - owner complaints, recall campaigns and manufacturer bulletins License: CC BY 4.0 (attribution: "PulsCar analysis of NHTSA public data, September 2026") SOURCES - NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation flat file COMPLAINTS (FLAT_CMPL), field dictionary https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/cmpl/CMPL.txt 777,040 owner complaints received 1 January 2015 - 8 September 2026. - NHTSA ODI flat files RECALLS (FLAT_RCL) and MANUFACTURER COMMUNICATIONS (FLAT_TSBS), https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/tsbs/TSBS.txt - Downloaded and indexed 17 September 2026; queries run 18 September 2026. QUERY - "a complaint that names a fuel injector" Step 1. Full-text search of complaint narratives for injector / injectors. -> 3,826 complaints. Step 2. Motorcycle and powersports makes removed. -> 3,816. Step 3. Sentence-level test: at least one sentence must contain the word injector or injectors and must not be about a diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) injector, a urea injector or a water injector, which are different parts. -> 3,792 complaints. This is the published set, received 3 January 2015 to 8 September 2026. SAMPLE READING (required before publishing any keyword count) 30 random matches were read. Twenty-six described a fuel injector fault, an injector repair or an injector recall. Four did not: a transmission failure, an engine-block class action, a camshaft solenoid oil leak and an engine that filled its oil pan with metal, all of which mention injectors in passing. Observed false-positive rate: about 13% in a sample of 30. Counts in the article are described as "complaints whose narrative names a fuel injector", never as a count of confirmed injector failures. FIGURES QUOTED IN THE ARTICLE (published set, n = 3,792) Fire 2.08% (79 reports), towed 4.98% (189), crash 0.61% (23), 30 injuries, no deaths. Baseline over all 777,040 complaints: fire 1.82%, towed 5.11%, crash 4.37%. Mileage: median 70,344; quartiles 40,038 and 105,000 (n = 1,548 with a usable odometer reading; rows with miles <= 0 or >= 400,000 dropped, so 59% of the set carries no usable mileage). Makes: Honda 1,212 (31.96% of the set), Ford 465, Hyundai 354, Chevrolet 324, BMW 205, GMC 157, Volkswagen 151, Kia 145. Models: Honda CR-V 452 (187 of model year 2017, 133 of 2018, 69 of 2019; median 70,000 miles, n = 103); Honda Accord 282 (193 of model year 2018; median 84,743 miles, n = 50); Honda Pilot 220; Hyundai Tucson 151 (122 of model year 2022; median 31,344 miles, n = 16); Ford Escape 108; Ford Bronco Sport 76 (5 of the 79 fire reports in the whole set). Code words: 160 complaints quote a P030x misfire code, 23 quote a P02xx injector-circuit code - seven misfire codes for every circuit code. 562 complaints (14.82%) mention a coil or a spark plug in the same narrative. 433 complaints (11.42%) say injectors were replaced; 23 of those 433 also say the fault returned or was not fixed. Only 27 complaints in the whole set (0.71%) mention injector cleaning, a fuel system service or an induction service of any kind. Owner-quoted dollar figures: every "$N" between $50 and $20,000 appearing in a narrative was collected - 814 figures, median $1,851, quartiles $900 and $4,000, 70.1% above $1,000 (file injector-owner-reported-amounts.csv). IMPORTANT: these are not prices. They are the amounts owners chose to type into a federal safety complaint, they sometimes include an engine or a tow rather than the injectors, and cheap outcomes are almost never written down. The article presents them as the expensive tail of the distribution and says so. RECALLS (file: injector-recall-campaigns.csv) Recall campaigns whose component field or defect text names a fuel injector: 20 distinct campaigns covering 1,630,685 potentially affected vehicles. 15 of the 20 (75%) name a fire in the consequence field. The largest are Ford 25V-467 (694,271), Ford 22V-859 (521,746), GM 19V-642 (177,282), Ford 24V-187 (42,652) and Ford 25V-165 (33,576). Campaign text was re-read from NHTSA's live campaign API on 18 September 2026. BULLETINS (file: injector-bulletins-by-make.csv) Communication summaries containing injector or injectors: 1,132 distinct communications (NHTSA_ID). 265 of them name a drivability symptom (misfire, rough idle, hesitation, stall, hard start, long crank or a P03xx code); of those 265, 104 mention replacement and 52 mention software, reprogramming, calibration or an update. Summaries are NHTSA's abstracts rather than full bulletin text, so both shares are floors. Heavy-truck and engine manufacturers (Cummins, Mack, Volvo, Hino) account for a large part of the 1,132, which is why the article quotes the drivability subset rather than the headline number. LIMITATIONS - Complaints are unverified owner reports, not failure rates, and are not normalized by the number of vehicles on the road. High-volume models produce high counts, and nothing here ranks manufacturers by reliability. - A model with a well-publicized problem or an open recall attracts complaints from owners who have read about it. The Ford Bronco Sport and Escape counts in particular include owners writing about the recall itself rather than about a failure they experienced. - Mileage is owner-entered, often rounded, and missing from 59% of this set. - No public dataset records how often a fuel-injector symptom is resolved by cleaning rather than replacement. The complaint file cannot answer that question, because owners do not file federal complaints about a $20 bottle of cleaner that worked. The article says so wherever the question comes up. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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. SQLite's LIKE and its FTS5 full-text index both ignore case by default, and 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, comparing the figures here with what a case-sensitive query would have returned. The result: the complaint set published here (3,826) is LARGER than the absolute ceiling a case-sensitive search of the same terms could have returned (837 narratives). A case-sensitive query cannot produce a bigger set than itself, so the bug is ruled out for this folder by arithmetic, not by assurance.