Tire failure analysis from NHTSA owner complaints
Owners file complaints with NHTSA when a tire fails. We read the 7,615 written accounts, classified what each one describes, and compared every tire line against the rate across the whole complaint record. What comes out is a picture you cannot get from NHTSA's own search: not how many complaints a tire has, but which failures it draws more often than tires in general.
By failure mode
Each page ranks the tires and vehicles where owners describe that failure far more often than the corpus average.
- Tread or belt separation; 13% of all tire complaints
- Blowout or sudden deflation; 20% of all tire complaints
- Sidewall failure; 15% of all tire complaints
- Bubble or bulge in the tire; 6% of all tire complaints
- Cracking or dry rot; 9% of all tire complaints
- Loss of control, rollover or collision; 8% of all tire complaints
- Pressure-monitoring (TPMS) fault; 2% of all tire complaints
- Premature or uneven wear; 1% of all tire complaints
By manufacturer
A line earns a page once at least 30 owners have filed a written account. Lines we also carry in the tire catalog show the same analysis on their catalog page instead.
| Manufacturer | Lines analyzed | Written reports |
|---|---|---|
| Firestone | 9 | 3,843 |
| Goodyear | 10 | 1,288 |
| Bridgestone | 6 | 599 |
| Michelin | 4 | 306 |
| Dunlop | 4 | 252 |
| Hankook | 3 | 178 |
| Continental | 2 | 158 |
| Power King | 1 | 146 |
| General | 2 | 141 |
| Yokohama | 2 | 141 |
| Cooper | 2 | 107 |
| Kumho | 2 | 95 |
| Uniroyal | 2 | 94 |
| Carlisle | 1 | 88 |
| B.F.Goodrich | 2 | 64 |
| Castle Rock | 1 | 51 |
| BCT | 1 | 34 |
| Nankang | 1 | 30 |
Looking up a vehicle instead?
NHTSA files a tire complaint against whoever the owner blamed, so the same record splits two ways. The analysis here is by tire. The same treatment by vehicle, alongside the official recall campaigns, is at tire recalls & safety by vehicle.
How to read this
Complaints are voluntarily submitted to the NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation and are not verified by NHTSA. They are owner-reported problems, not proven defects, and volume tracks how many of a tire were sold as much as how often it failed. What is comparable is the mix: which problems owners describe here versus across every tire complaint on file. That comparison, the mileage distribution and the mode rankings on this page are our analysis of the public record.
Sources
Last verified 2026-10-07 against the sources below.
- NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation; owner complaints dataset (unverified owner reports, US federal government work, public domain).
- NHTSA Recalls database, nhtsa.gov/recalls.
- Corpus baselines computed over 58,390 complaint narratives longer than 200 characters.