PulsCar analysis of NHTSA and BLS public data, September 2026
Topic: what owners say they paid, and how often a paid repair sits next to a recall
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.
  Downloaded and indexed 17 September 2026; queries run 18 September 2026.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index series CUUR0000SETD,
  "Motor vehicle maintenance and repair", U.S. city average, not seasonally
  adjusted, 1982-84 = 100. Pulled from the BLS public API v1 on 18 September 2026,
  months January 2019 through August 2026 (the latest month published).
  Series page: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SETD

QUERY 1 - amounts owners say they paid or were quoted
  55,937 complaint narratives contain a dollar sign. Of those, narratives matching
  an out-of-pocket phrase - "out of pocket", "I paid", "we paid", "paid $",
  "charged me", "cost me", "quoted me", "billed me $", "had to pay" - and
  containing at least one dollar figure between $50 and $60,000 (values outside
  that range are usually vehicle prices, mileages or typos): 9,809 complaints.
  For each complaint we take the LARGEST qualifying figure, on the reasoning that
  owners usually name the repair total plus smaller side costs.
  Distribution published in owner-reported-repair-amounts.csv.
  Median $1,500; quartiles $600 and $3,863.

QUERY 2 - a recall and the owner's own money in the same passage
  Narratives containing both "recall" and an own-money phrase ("out of pocket",
  "I paid", "we paid", "paid for the repair", "already paid", "reimburse*",
  "refund*", "at my own expense", "my own money") with the two within 300
  characters of each other: 7,470 complaints.
  Of those, 456 contain explicit refusal or denial language ("refused to
  reimburse", "denied my claim", "would not cover", "declined to assist").
  2,449 of the 7,470 also name a dollar figure; their median is $1,260.

SAMPLE READING (required before publishing any keyword count)
  Query 1: 30 random matches read in context. All 30 named a dollar figure the
  owner had paid or been quoted. In some the figure is a diagnostic fee, a tow or
  a rental rather than the repair itself, which is why the article calls the
  figure "money this failure cost the owner", not "the repair bill".
  Query 2: 20 random matches read in context. 18 concerned repair money next to a
  recall; 2 concerned loaner-car or rental reimbursement rather than a repair.
  Observed false-positive rate about 10% in that sample of 20, which is small.

CPI CALCULATION
  Index 320.504 in August 2021 and 465.136 in August 2026: +45.1%.
  August 2025 441.987 to August 2026 465.136: +5.2%.
  August 2019 297.884 to August 2026 465.136: +56.1%.
  The index measures prices charged for motor vehicle maintenance and repair; it
  is not an average bill, and no average-bill figure is claimed anywhere from it.

LIMITATIONS
- NHTSA complaints are unverified owner reports. Owners write to the federal
  government when a repair was expensive, frightening or refused, so these amounts
  describe complained-about repairs and say NOTHING about a typical repair bill.
  The article states this explicitly next to every figure.
- "Recall and own money in the same passage" is not a measure of wrongful billing.
  It includes owners asking whether a defect should be recalled, owners seeking
  reimbursement they later received, and owners whose VIN was outside a recall's
  range. It measures how often the two subjects appear together in owner reports.
- Amounts are as typed by owners: some are quotes, not paid bills; some are
  rounded; some include a tow or rental.
- No personal data is published: no VIN, no city, no dealer name, no free text.

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CASE SENSITIVITY — SECTION ADDED 19 SEPTEMBER 2026
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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 base figure was re-run case-insensitively on 19 September 2026
and returned 55,937 narratives containing a dollar sign — exactly the figure
published above. The own-money phrase set returns 9,029 case-insensitively
against 4,896 case-sensitively, and the published 9,809 is above the
case-sensitive ceiling.