Recalls never completed: a million repairs the Dutch register is still waiting for

Every recall makes the news for a day. A carmaker admits a fault, a number of cars is quoted, and that is the last anyone hears of it.

Almost nobody reports the part that actually matters: did the cars ever get fixed? Not because it is uninteresting, but because almost no safety authority publishes it.

The Dutch authority does. It records a repair status for every vehicle covered by every recall, and the answer is uncomfortable.

Nearly one in five, never reported repaired

Across the whole Dutch record (every recall, every covered vehicle, back to the 1990s) about 18% of obligations have no repair recorded against them. For some importers it is over a third.

That is not a rounding error or a backlog of last month’s notices. It includes recalls issued more than a decade ago that still carry thousands of vehicles with nothing logged.

Read the caveat before you quote the number

“Open” means the manufacturer never reported a repair for that vehicle. It does not prove the car is still driving around unfixed. A vehicle that was scrapped, exported, or simply never brought back to a dealer stays open in the record forever, and there is no field that distinguishes those cases.

So the honest reading is this: for a million vehicle-recall obligations in one small country, nobody can say whether the safety work was ever done. That is a different sentence from “a million dangerous cars”, and we are not going to print the second one.

It also means the true completion rate cannot be higher than these figures suggest, only lower. Every scrapped car flattered the number in the manufacturer’s favour.

Why the names are importers

The Netherlands vehicle register records the party that reported the recall, which in the Netherlands is the national importer or distributor, so the table names, for example, BMW Nederland B.V., not BMW AG. A Dutch importer’s completion rate is not proof of a global manufacturer’s, and we do not present it as one.

On privacy

The source table is keyed by licence plate: 5.7 million rows, each one a real car. We never read it at that level and never store a plate. Every figure here is a server-side aggregate: counts per campaign and per importer. A study about how many cars went unfixed does not require knowing whose car it is, and building it any other way would have been a choice, not a necessity.

Check it yourself

The full study, including every campaign, rebuilds daily at /wp-json/cmvuf/v1/report. The sources are the Netherlands vehicle register’s open data: recall status per vehicle and recall actions, both free and public. The analysis is ours; the arithmetic is reproducible in an afternoon.

The rest of the record

• How long before anyone tells you your car is unsafe? Median 18 days, worst case ten years.
• The same recall, two countries, two stories.
• Was your recall quietly rewritten?
• The worldwide recall change register.

Completion is one gap. Wording is another: the severity index scores how the same defect is described to drivers in each country.

Every campaign, by the manufacturer that reported it

Each of the 4,166 campaigns in this file has its own page, showing how much of it was never finished.

• Stellantis Nederland B.V. 872
• Pon's Automobielhandel B.V. 375
• Mercedes-Benz Nederland B.V. (Cars) 341
• BMW Nederland B.V. 251
• Louwman & Parqui B.V. 215
• Ford Nederland B.V. 212
• Mercedes-Benz Nederland B.V. (Vans) 154
• Renault Nederland N.V. 153
• Jaguar Land Rover Nederland B.V. 144
• Daimler Trucks Nederland B.V. 133
• Pon's Automobielhandel B.V. (Luxury Cars) 106
• Honda Motor Europe Benelux Branche 102
• Nissan Nederland 96
• Volvo Cars Nederland B.V. 91
• Hyundai Motor Netherlands b.v. 86
• B.V. Nimag 74
• Mazda Motor Nederland 74
• Kia Nederland B.V. 60
• Mitsubishi Motor Sales Nederland B.V. 58
• Yamaha Motor Nederland B.V. 52
• JeeGee Motors B.V. 46
• Triumph Motorcycles B.V. 40
• KTM Sportmotorcycle Nederland B.V. 39
• Harley-Davidson Benelux BV 36
• Piaggio Vespa B.V. 35
• Ducati North Europe 34
• N.V. Subaru Benelux 29
• Kawasaki Motors Europe N.V. 26
• Tesla Motors Netherlands BV 25
• Klintberg and Way Parts AB 25
• Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd 16
• MAN Trucks & Bus B.V. 16
• Ferrari SpA 12
• Maserati West Europe Benelux Office 11
• Bovensiepen Automobile GmbH + Co. KG 9
• Scania Nederland B.V. 8
• Knaus Tabbert AG 7
• Renault Trucks Nederland - terugroepacties 7
• Hymer GmbH & Co. KG 7
• MotoMondo B.V. 5
• Moteo Nederland B.V. 4
• Louwman Parts & Service B.V. 4
• LMC Caravan GmbH 4
• ISUZU Benelux 4
• Lotus Cars Limited 4
• Polyplastic B.V. 3
• Schmitz Cargobull AG 3
• Fendt Caravans Nederland BV 3
• Ssang Yong Motors Middle Europe 3
• Bockmann Fahrzeugwerke GmbH 3
• Zero Motorcycles Inc. 3
• Daimler Buses Nederland B.V. 3
• Van Mossel MG BV - certificaat terugroepacties 2
• Adria Benelux B.V. 2
• myStromer Europe B.V. 2
• Hobby Benelux Caravans BV 2
• Aixam Mega Nederland BV 2
• Saris Aanhangwagen B.V. 2
• VB-Airsuspension B.V. 2
• CNH Industrial Benelux - certificaat Recall 2
• Eura Mobil GmbH 2
• Humbaur GmbH 2
• Rolls Royce Motor Cars Limited 2
• Forschelen Consultancy BV 2
• Lynk en Co Sales Netherlands B.V. 1
• DAF Trucks NV 1
• SILENCE Nederland B.V. 1
• Alois Kober GMBH 1
• Wagenbouw Hapert B.V. 1
• Klever Mobility NL B.V. 1
• Alles Is Vakantie BV 1
• StreetScooter GmbH 1
• Optima-Cycles B.V. 1
• MOOOF N.V. 1
• Tuk Tuk Factory BV 1
• Williams Trailers Limited 1
• CNG-Technik GmbH 1
• Variant A/S 1
• Lucid Europe B.V. 1
• Tripod Mobility B.V. 1
• Torrot Electric Europa S.A. 1
• Liebherr-Mischtechnik GmbH 1
• Niesmann + Bischoff GmbH 1

Every figure on this page comes from a table you can have. 37 rows, CSV JSON All 14 datasets