How long before anyone tells you your car is unsafe?

When a carmaker discovers a defect, two things happen on two different days. First the maker declares it. Then, at some point after that, somebody tells you.

Nobody publishes the distance between those two days. Not because it is hard to work out, because the two dates sit in different columns of a public dataset and nobody has subtracted one from the other.

We did. The middle case is 18 days. The worst on record is ten years.

Where the wait actually falls

The middle case is not the story. The story is the tail: a fifth of Dutch owners were told the same day, and one recall in twelve took longer than three months to reach them.

The wait, by the party that filed the recall

Reporting party	Recalls	Typical gap	Slowest one in ten	Worst	Told the same day
SubaruN.V. Subaru Benelux	29	96	280	388	7%
Honda MotorHonda Motor Europe Benelux Branche	87	78	262	1,299	3%
Klintberg and Way PartsKlintberg and Way Parts AB	25	75	195	402	0%
Jaguar Land RoverJaguar Land Rover Nederland B.V.	137	54	561	1,438	6%
Daimler TrucksDaimler Trucks Nederland B.V.	134	43	92	265	4%
Mazda MotorMazda Motor Nederland	71	42	154	327	7%
KiaKia Nederland B.V.	59	40	133	562	5%
Mercedes-Benz (Cars)Mercedes-Benz Nederland B.V. (Cars)	321	38	130	1,184	3%
Mercedes-Benz (Vans)Mercedes-Benz Nederland B.V. (Vans)	145	37	119	890	1%
NimagB.V. Nimag	71	31	60	1,051	13%
NissanNissan Nederland	91	28	119	303	25%
Hyundai MotorHyundai Motor Netherlands b.v.	77	27	75	448	12%
Mitsubishi Motor SalesMitsubishi Motor Sales Nederland B.V.	59	26	52	1,209	15%
Harley-DavidsonHarley-Davidson Benelux BV	35	20	43	293	14%
Volvo CarsVolvo Cars Nederland B.V.	88	18	57	1,225	5%
FordFord Nederland B.V.	207	17	70	495	13%
Pon's Automobielhandel (Luxury Cars)Pon's Automobielhandel B.V. (Luxury Cars)	86	17	76	1,150	17%
Yamaha MotorYamaha Motor Nederland B.V.	49	16	30	381	4%
StellantisStellantis Nederland B.V.	780	14	106	708	21%
JeeGee MotorsJeeGee Motors B.V.	31	14	148	1,233	13%
Triumph MotorcyclesTriumph Motorcycles B.V.	36	13	32	158	25%
Tesla MotorsTesla Motors Netherlands BV	20	13	55	62	20%
RenaultRenault Nederland N.V.	139	10	53	516	19%
KTM SportmotorcycleKTM Sportmotorcycle Nederland B.V.	41	9	23	248	15%
Pon's AutomobielhandelPon's Automobielhandel B.V.	348	7	33	1,970	10%
Ducati NorthDucati North Europe	32	7	31	111	13%
BMWBMW Nederland B.V.	210	6	40	514	33%
Piaggio VespaPiaggio Vespa B.V.	34	6	14	379	9%
Aston Martin LagondaAston Martin Lagonda Ltd	17	4	21	49	18%
Kawasaki MotorsKawasaki Motors Europe N.V.	26	2	4	14	42%
Louwman ParquiLouwman & Parqui B.V.	173	0	35	3,652	76%

Every figure is in days. “Typical gap” is the median, which one long delay cannot drag. Companies filing fewer than fifteen recalls are left out of this table because a median of three is not a pattern; they are still inside every total above.

Why the Netherlands

Because the Netherlands vehicle register, the Dutch vehicle authority, is the only one we have found anywhere that publishes both dates in machine-readable form, for every recall, going back to 2007. Five thousand two hundred and sixty-seven of them.

The United States publishes recall text but not the manufacturer’s own announcement date. The United Kingdom, Canada, France and Poland publish the notice, not the clock behind it. Germany publishes a searchable database with no export. That is not a gap in our research. It is the finding: the only reason this number has never been published is that almost no country lets you compute it.

What the number is, exactly

Days between datum_aankondiging_producent (the date the producer announced the defect), and datum_informeren_eigenaar, the date recorded for informing owners. Both are the Netherlands vehicle register’s own fields. We do not estimate either one and we do not model anything.

It is the date recorded for informing owners, not the day a letter landed on a doormat. The real-world delay a driver experiences is this figure or longer, never shorter.

Why the names are importers, not carmakers

The Netherlands vehicle register records the party that reported the recall, which in the Netherlands is the national importer or distributor. So the table says Subaru’s Dutch importer, not Subaru. A slow Dutch importer does not prove a slow global manufacturer, and we are not going to imply that it does.

What the table does show is that the spread is not a matter of a few days. It is the whole scale. Louwman & Parqui, which brings Toyota and Lexus into the Netherlands, has a median of zero across 173 recalls: the day owners were informed is the day the defect was declared. Subaru’s Dutch importer has a median of 96 days across 29. BMW sits at six days across 208, so volume is not the explanation either way.

These are all reporting to the same regulator, in the same country, under the same rules. Whatever separates the top of that table from the bottom, it is not the law.

What we excluded

Of 5,267 actions, 1,140 do not carry both dates and 302 record an owner-notification date earlier than the announcement date. A negative gap means the record is odd, not that owners were warned before the defect was declared, so those are reported separately and kept out of every figure. That leaves 3,827 usable pairs: 73% of the holding. We would rather publish a smaller honest number than a bigger tidy one.

Take it and check it

The study rebuilds daily at /wp-json/cmvnl/v1/lag, with every figure above plus the full breakdown. The underlying data is the Netherlands vehicle register’s, free and open, at opendata.rdw.nl. Recompute it yourself; we would rather be checked than believed.

The rest of the record

• A million recalled cars with no repair on record: 18% of Dutch recall obligations have no repair logged against them.
• The same recall, two countries, two stories: matched across borders by the maker’s own code, months apart, and described with different severity.
• Was your recall quietly rewritten? Whether the fix for your car has changed since it was announced.
• Proof of what a recall said today: the dated hash manifest.
• The worldwide recall change register.
• Which countries let you see recall changes.

And whether the Dutch notices change after publication

Separately from the dates, the full Dutch wording of the 1,500 most recent recall actions is read every three hours and kept. Since 18 August 2026, 32 of them have been rewritten after publication, and both versions are held here.

Last read 17 September 2026, 08:05 UTC. Freshness of every engine.

A delay is one way a warning loses force. Another is the wording itself: the severity index scores the same defect as it was described in America and in the Netherlands.

Every figure on this page comes from a table you can have. 31 rows, CSV JSON All 14 datasets