About TorqueAndTally
TorqueAndTally answers the two questions a person actually has about a car they own or are about to buy: what does this thing really cost me to run, and what goes wrong with them?
That answer exists today only in pieces, scattered across federal agencies that do not talk to each other and written in the vocabulary of regulators. Every source here is free and public. Anyone can read fueleconomy.gov. Almost nobody can hold several agencies' data in their head at once and turn it into “roughly $2,200 a year in fuel, and watch the windshield”.
Where the numbers come from
- Running costs — the EPA and Department of Energy's fuel economy database. The annual fuel cost is their estimate at 15,000 miles a year on their assumed fuel price, not a prediction about you.
- Reported faults — NHTSA's owner complaint database, aggregated by component. The aggregation is the work: the agency will show you filings one at a time in date order, and the useful answer only appears once thousands of them are counted by system.
How to read the complaint counts
They describe one vehicle against itself. They are not a fault rate and cannot be compared between two vehicles: NHTSA publishes no sales figures, so a car that sold well and a car that broke often look identical in a raw total.
Where there are too few filings to see a pattern, this site says so and names no component, rather than ranking three complaints as though that meant something. Where an agency holds no record at all, it says that too — an absence of data is not evidence that nothing goes wrong.
What this is not
TorqueAndTally is not a safety service and does not tell you whether a vehicle is safe to drive. Owner complaints are unverified reports filed by members of the public; they are not findings against a manufacturer and not a safety rating. Recall and complaint history appears here as context inside a purchase decision, nothing more.
If you need to know whether your specific vehicle is under an open safety recall, check the manufacturer or NHTSA's own recall lookup by VIN.
See the privacy and cookie policy for what is recorded when you use the site.