Continental tire failures: owner complaint analysis
What owners told NHTSA about Continental tires; 158 written complaints across 2 lines, classified by failure mode and compared with the whole tire-complaint corpus.
Continental lines with enough reports to analyze
A line appears here once at least 30 owners have filed a written account of a failure. "Relative" compares the most-described problem on that line with how often it appears across all tire complaints.
| Line | Written reports | Most described | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contitouring | 104 | Blowout or sudden deflation | 1.0× |
| Sport Contact | 54 | Sidewall failure | 1.9× |
Across every continental tire
What owners described
Sidewall failure appears in 26% of these reports; about 1.8× as often as across all tire complaints. Percentages are shares of the 1,668 reports filed against Continental tires across every line and vehicle that include a written account; a single report can describe more than one problem, so they do not total 100%.
| Reported problem | This subject | All tire complaints | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sidewall failure | 26% | 15% | 1.8× |
| Blowout or sudden deflation | 25% | 20% | 1.3× |
| Tread or belt separation | 12% | 13% | 0.9× |
| Bubble or bulge in the tire | 11% | 6% | 1.8× |
| Cracking or dry rot | 8% | 9% | 0.9× |
| Loss of control, rollover or collision | 7% | 8% | 0.9× |
Mileage at failure
1,019 of these reports state an odometer reading. The middle report is at 18,000 miles, with 8 in 10 falling between 3,000 and 43,993 miles.
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.