Primary data
Every MotorCensus complaint statistic derives from files published by the NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation. NHTSA calls an ODI complaint a Vehicle Owner's Questionnaire, or VOQ. Government-authored database fields may have public-domain status, but complaint narratives are submitted by consumers and MotorCensus makes no blanket copyright claim over them.
Processing uses make/model normalization, ODINO-based incident deduplication, grouping, clustering, and arithmetic. Review the complaint flat file, the data dictionary, or download the published MotorCensus model-year aggregate.