PulsCar analysis of NHTSA public data, September 2026 Topic: steering wheel shaking, vibration, shimmy and death wobble License: CC BY 4.0 (attribution: "PulsCar analysis of NHTSA public data, September 2026") ------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. SOURCE FILES ------------------------------------------------------------------ NHTSA public flat files, downloaded 17 September 2026 into a local SQLite database: COMPLAINTS (FLAT_CMPL), RECALLS (FLAT_RCL), TSBS (FLAT_TSB, the manufacturer-communication index) and INVESTIGATIONS (FLAT_INV). Field definitions: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/cmpl/CMPL.txt Complaint rows: 777,040 unique reports received 1 January 2015 to 8 September 2026. That window is the denominator for every percentage below. ------------------------------------------------------------------ 2. THE COMPLAINT QUERY ------------------------------------------------------------------ Stage 1, FTS5 match on the description: ("steering wheel" OR steering OR vehicle OR front OR wheel) AND (shake OR shakes OR shaking OR vibrate OR vibrates OR vibration OR wobble OR wobbles OR shimmy OR shimmies) Raw matches: 18,872. That query is far too loose - it catches engine vibration, seat vibration and "the vehicle shook on impact". Stage 2, a regex on the same text requiring the STEERING WHEEL or the road wheels to be what shakes: STEERING WHEEL (SHAK|VIBRAT|WOBBL|SHIMM) | WHEEL (SHAKES|SHOOK|SHAKING|VIBRAT|WOBBL) | SHAK\w* (IN|THROUGH) THE STEERING | STEERING (SHAKE|SHAKES|SHAKING|VIBRAT|WOBBL|SHIMM) | DEATH WOBBLE | VIOLENT\w* (SHAK|VIBRAT|WOBBL) Working set: 4,962 complaints. No component filter was applied, because steering shake is coded by NHTSA to STEERING, SUSPENSION, WHEELS, SERVICE BRAKES and others depending on what the owner blamed. FALSE-POSITIVE READ. We read 30 randomly selected matches in full (seed 21). All 30 were on topic: the steering wheel or the front end is what shakes. Observed false-positive rate: 0 of 30. The stage-2 regex is what earned that; without it the rate in stage 1 is far higher. ------------------------------------------------------------------ 3. THE HEADLINE RESULT, AND WHY IT IS A RESULT ABOUT THE FILE ------------------------------------------------------------------ 2,993 of the 4,962 complaints (60.3%) contain the phrase "death wobble" (or the common misspelling "death wabble"). NHTSA's steering-shake file is overwhelmingly a death-wobble file. This is a fact about who files federal safety complaints, NOT about what causes steering vibration in the population of cars. Tire imbalance is cheap, is fixed in half an hour at a tire shop and almost never produces a federal safety complaint. Violent, uncontrollable oscillation does. Every count below must be read through that filter, and the article says so. Death-wobble subset (2,993 reports): makes ........ Ford 1,933 · Jeep 818 · Dodge 138 · Ram 58 models ....... Ford F-250 SD 1,102 · Jeep Wrangler 657 · Ford F-350 SD 445 · Ford F-250 231 · Ford F-350 126 · Dodge Ram 2500 89 · Jeep Gladiator 67 mileage ...... 1,921 usable; median 32,000; 47.1% under 30,000 miles; 12.2% under 10,000 miles Jeep Wrangler death-wobble mileage: median 12,000, quartiles 5,000-38,000 Ford F-250 SD death-wobble mileage: median 26,300, quartiles 17,500-40,000 Non-death-wobble subset (1,969 reports): median mileage 48,000 (1,162 usable), quartiles 17,000-100,500. Text shares inside this subset: brakes or rotors 19.0%, tires 17.5%, alignment 6.6%, balance 5.1%, bearings 1.6%, tie rods 1.5%. Whole working set (4,962), text shares: steering damper or stabilizer named ....... 664 (13.4%) a recall named ............................ 920 (18.5%) two or more shop visits described ......... 880 (17.7%) tires named ............................... 925 (18.6%) alignment named ........................... 367 ( 7.4%) braking named ............................. 290 ( 5.8%) track bar named ........................... 194 ( 3.9%) balance named ............................. 192 ( 3.9%) tie rods named ............................ 170 ( 3.4%) ball joints named ......................... 160 ( 3.2%) rotors named .............................. 116 ( 2.3%) drag link named ........................... 86 ( 1.7%) shop could not duplicate or diagnose ...... 213 ( 4.3%) wheel bearing or hub assembly named ....... 32 ( 0.6%) Every text share is a floor. An owner who does not type "balance" may still have had a balance problem. Towed 1.0%, crash alleged 1.2%, injuries reported 43, deaths reported 0 - all well below the all-complaints baseline of 5.1% towed and 4.4% crash. Mileage rows with miles <= 0 or >= 400,000 were dropped; 3,083 of 4,962 (62.1%) carry a usable mileage. Whole-set median 35,500, quartiles 17,000-87,000. ------------------------------------------------------------------ 4. PUBLISHED FILES ------------------------------------------------------------------ shake-complaints-by-make.csv top 30 makes: complaints, share, how many are death-wobble reports, median mileage shake-top-models.csv top 35 make+model: complaints, death-wobble count, median/Q1/Q3 mileage, peak years shake-by-model-year.csv all shake complaints and death-wobble complaints by vehicle model year shake-death-wobble-mileage.csv death-wobble reports by mileage bucket shake-steering-wheel-bulletins.csv 299 manufacturer communications whose summary pairs "steering wheel" with shimmy/wobble/vibration/shake/shudder/ oscillation, with our category Bulletin query (FTS on the summary): ("steering wheel") AND (shimmy OR wobble OR vibration OR shake OR shudder OR oscillation) 299 distinct NHTSA document IDs. A broader query that also allows "steering", "wheel" or "tire" in place of "steering wheel" returns 511. By make, the narrow set is led by Chevrolet 37, Jeep 30, Acura 27, GMC 26, Honda 25, Dodge 21, Toyota 19, Ford 17, Mazda 14. Our "category" column is a keyword guess over the first 180 characters of the summary, not NHTSA's classification, and it is offered only as a sorting aid. ------------------------------------------------------------------ 5. PRIMARY DOCUMENTS OPENED AND READ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Stellantis STAR case S1819000004 Rev. R, "Shimmy Felt In Front End", December 2025 (NHTSA ID 11026558) https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2025/MC-11026558-0001.pdf Stellantis TSB 19-002-24, "Air Trapped in Steering Damper Warranty Extension XF1", 7 November 2024, superseding 23-041-24 (NHTSA ID 11010473) https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2024/MC-11010473-0002.pdf GM PIT6154A, "Diagnostic Tip For Steering Wheel Oscillation Wobble Shimmy Dither Vibration", published 23 May 2024 (NHTSA ID 11006344) https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2024/MC-11006344-0001.pdf Mercedes-Benz LI46.35-P-073051 version 5, "Noticeable Vibrations At The Steering Wheel", 11 June 2024 (NHTSA ID 11003212) https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2024/MC-11003212-0001.pdf Mazda SA-008/23, steering shimmy from tire flat spots during storage, February 2023, superseding SA-033/22 (NHTSA ID 10232302) https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2023/MC-10232302-0001.pdf Recall 18V-675, 2018-2019 Jeep Wrangler front track bar bracket welds, 18,055 vehicles, read through the NHTSA recalls API https://api.nhtsa.gov/recalls/campaignNumber?campaignNumber=18V675 ------------------------------------------------------------------ 6. LIMITATIONS ------------------------------------------------------------------ - Complaints are self-reported, unverified and unweighted by fleet size. They are not failure rates, and nothing here supports "brand X shakes most". - Selection is extreme on this topic (see section 3). A file that is 60% death wobble cannot be used to estimate how often steering shake is a balance problem, and we do not use it that way anywhere. - Publicity drives counts. "Death wobble" is a well-known phrase, which makes owners more likely to use it and more likely to file at all. - Mileage is present on 62.1% of rows and is the owner's estimate. - Our bulletin category column is a keyword guess, not a reading of all 299 documents. Only the five bulletins listed in section 5 were opened and read. - www.nhtsa.gov blocks automated requests (HTTP 403), so recall records link to api.nhtsa.gov, which serves the same NHTSA record. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 (4,962) is LARGER than the absolute ceiling a case-sensitive search of the same terms could have returned (336 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.