A Third of Recalled Vehicles Stay Unrepaired, NHTSA Wants Your Comments by Dec. 5

• NHTSA holds a public meeting in Washington on Thursday, Nov. 5, on how to get more owners to finish recall repairs, and it will not live stream or record the event.
• Vehicle recalls initiated from 2012 to 2022 reached a 65.8 percent average completion rate, which leaves about 34 of every 100 affected vehicles unrepaired.
• Anyone can file a written comment under Docket NHTSA-2026-2014 at regulations.gov until Dec. 5.

A Free Safety Repair Goes Undone on One Recalled Vehicle in Three

NHTSA is asking for help. The agency’s Recalls Next meeting on Thursday, Nov. 5, brings regulators, automakers and researchers together to review recall completion trends and past recall performance, and the public docket stays open for 30 days after the meeting, until Dec. 5. For a driver without a seat in the room, that written docket is the way in.

The numbers explain the meeting. NHTSA’s April 2026 report to Congress puts the average completion rate for vehicle recalls initiated between 2012 and 2022 at 65.8 percent. The remaining 34.2 percent of affected vehicles, about a third, remain unrepaired, and manufacturers are not allowed to charge owners for the repair.

Whether your car is one of them is a question you can answer today by entering your VIN at nhtsa.gov/recalls. Our explainer on the 29.2 million vehicles recalled in 2025 walks through the VIN check step by step.

What NHTSA Is Asking and Who Gets a Say

NHTSA announced the meeting in a Federal Register notice on Sept. 28 (91 FR 61288, signed by Administrator Jonathan Morrison). The event, titled Recalls Next: Technological Innovations and Safety Recalls, runs from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Eastern in the West Building Atrium at U.S. Department of Transportation headquarters, 1200 New Jersey Avenue SE. Registration to attend closed on Oct. 29, and the notice states the event will not be live streamed or recorded.

Morrison and Eileen Sullivan, NHTSA’s associate administrator for enforcement, open the day. A morning panel covers automated vehicles and over-the-air software remedies, with speakers from Zoox, Waymo, Rivian and General Motors. Breakout sessions cover recall notifications and the barriers that stop owners from finishing repairs, with speakers from IIHS, Ford and the National Automobile Dealers Association. An afternoon panel on data and challenges in the states includes Phil Dacey, deputy administrator of the Maryland Department of Transportation Motor Vehicle Administration, and a speaker from Experian Automotive.

NHTSA gives its reason in the notice. In 2025 the agency administered nearly 900 vehicle safety recalls affecting more than 29.2 million vehicles, and those figures have stayed generally stable over the past five years. What has changed is complexity, as new vehicle technology reaches the market. The notice names three problems: reaching owners of used vehicles no longer held by the original purchaser, incomplete or outdated owner contact information, and gaps in completion between different groups of vehicles.

The agency says it intends to use stakeholder input to shape its upcoming activities. It asks for public comments on the information presented at the meeting, on its recall safety priorities, on gaps the public sees, and on topics for future meetings.

Why a Third of Recalled Vehicles Stay Unrepaired

Age drives the gap. NHTSA’s report to Congress, written to meet a mandate in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed Nov. 15, 2021, calls vehicle age the predominant factor in low completion rates. Vehicles zero to three years old complete at around 87 percent, as they return to franchised dealers for service, warranty work and trade-ins, and the dealer holds the original buyer’s contact details. Older vehicles lose value, change hands and visit the dealer less often.

Recall letters travel by first-class mail. Federal regulation requires a manufacturer to mail a letter to the registered owner within 60 days of telling NHTSA about a recall, using names and addresses from state records and other sources. Most manufacturers buy registration data from state motor vehicle departments through data aggregators, and what a state supplies varies. Some record several addresses, emails and phone numbers. Others hold a single address. One manufacturer found that around 45 percent of owners with open recalls might not have been receiving notifications, even with certified mail.

People move and cars change owners. NHTSA data shows up to 30 percent of unrepaired vehicles in older recall campaigns see an owner or address change every year, and up to 30 percent of vehicles in the Takata air bag recalls were classed as unreachable after export, theft, scrapping or missed notices. Checking online is rare as well: in 2019 NHTSA research, only 18 percent of people surveyed had used NHTSA’s website to check for recalls.

Used-car buyers face a gap of their own. The Safety Act, at 49 U.S.C. 30120(i), bars the sale or lease of a new vehicle with an open safety recall. That prohibition does not extend to used vehicles, with a single exception for rental car companies. The report ties that gap to fatalities in recalled vehicles sold by used dealers. Every new campaign, such as those in our recent NHTSA recall roundup, adds another set of owners who need to be found.

Inconvenience finishes the job. A 2018 survey by the independent monitor of the Takata recalls found that 40 percent of owners named inconvenience as the main reason for leaving a recall undone, and a later Stout survey reported about the same share. In the monitor’s survey, only half of respondents would travel up to 10 miles for a repair, 38 percent would wait a maximum of two hours, 41 percent said a free loaner vehicle would motivate them, and 33 percent wanted a guaranteed short repair time. NHTSA also has no statutory authority to force consumers to fix a recalled vehicle. It can press manufacturers on completion rates and order additional notifications.

What Has Worked Elsewhere

NHTSA’s evidence comes mostly from the Takata air bag campaign, the largest recall in U.S. history, where a coordinated remedy order demanded outreach well beyond standard letters.

State motor vehicle departments delivered some of the biggest gains. Letters carrying a DMV logo reached about 4.6 million owners in 2019, and repair rates in participating states rose by more than 300 percent in some cases. By November 2020 the effort covered 18 states and more than 6.5 million owners. DMV letter campaigns reach repair rates two to three times higher than manufacturer notices alone. Four states that received NHTSA grants to notify owners at registration renewal (Maryland, California, Texas and Ohio) notified consumers of 9.5 million open safety recalls, and nearly 2 million were repaired, roughly one in five.

Other channels delivered too. Virginia’s E-ZPass operation and the Virginia DMV emailed about 37,000 account holders with open Takata recalls and saw completion rates eight to ten times higher than other outreach. An insurer co-branded message from one manufacturer produced a completion rate 350 percent higher than its usual communications. A Takata-affected manufacturer that worked with an auction house in 2018 saw about 90 percent of open-recall vehicles traded there repaired. Dealer incentives such as mobile repair and free towing doubled repairs. At certain points in some campaigns, vehicles with a phone number on file completed at twice the rate of vehicles without one.

Some governments tie registration to repairs. After the Takata recall, Australia and Japan temporarily barred unrepaired vehicles from registration, and Australia reached a 99.9 percent completion rate. In the U.S., a federal bill, the RECALL Act proposed in 2015, would have tied renewal to repairs but did not become law. NHTSA’s April report cautions that a registration requirement would fall hardest on households with limited transportation options, non-English speakers and owners of older vehicles, who are more often lower income. That trade-off is the kind of question a public comment can address.

NHTSA also proposed, in a supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking, to require manufacturers to notify owners electronically in addition to first-class mail. The agency says it is considering a batch VIN lookup tool and plans to open talks with the auto insurance industry.

What to Do Before Dec. 5

Check your VIN. Enter it at nhtsa.gov/recalls. The repair is free by law. Owners of older cars can also read our guide on how to check for a deadly Takata airbag.

Check again when you buy. The sale of a used car with an open recall is legal, so run the VIN before you hand over money and ask the seller to finish any open repair.

Keep your address current. Manufacturers pull owner names and addresses from state registration data, so a move you have not reported to your state DMV can send a recall letter to a stranger. Update your registration after every move.

File a comment. Go to regulations.gov, search for Docket NHTSA-2026-2014, and follow the online instructions. Every submission must include the agency name (NHTSA) and the docket number. Mail goes to the Docket Management Facility, U.S. Department of Transportation, 1200 New Jersey Avenue SE, West Building Ground Floor, Room W12-140, Washington, DC 20590-0001. NHTSA posts every comment without change at regulations.gov, personal information included, and anyone can search comments by the submitter’s name, so leave out details you do not want public.

The comments that help most are specific: how a recall letter reached you, or failed to, whether text or email would have worked better, how far you would drive for a repair, whether dealer hours or a missing loaner stopped you, and where you stand on tying registration renewal to open recalls.

After Dec. 5, NHTSA intends to use stakeholder input to inform its upcoming activities. The electronic notification proposal and the planned talks with insurers are the pieces to watch.

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