This Car Brand Has The Most Recalls In America

In one sense, a car recall is a good thing, even if it's inconvenient for owners. It's evidence that an automaker has identified a problem and has been pressured into doing something about it, which in turn helps make cars safer and more reliable than they would have otherwise been. Of course, most car owners would have preferred that their cars had simply been built without recall-worthy defects in the first place, but the increasing complexity of modern vehicles has seen recalls become a normal part of the ownership experience for many.

Virtually every automaker has issued some recalls in recent years, but new research from iSeeCars has highlighted a huge difference in recall rates between major brands. From April 2025 through March 2026, Ford has issued recalls for far more of its vehicles than any other manufacturer, with around 19.5 million of its vehicles affected. That's almost five times more than the second-highest placed manufacturer, Toyota, which recalled 4.1 million vehicles over the same timeframe.

According to the report, Ford has recalled more vehicles in the past year than every other automaker combined. To add to the Blue Oval's woes, the Lincoln Aviator has the highest number of expected lifetime safety-related recalls of any new car, based on iSeeCars' analysis of recall data for model years 2017 to 2025. It's predicted to receive 23.4 times more recalls than the average new car.

The Lincoln Aviator is far from the only Ford Motor Company model to appear in iSeeCars' list of the worst offenders. Its stablemate, the Corsair, is predicted to see the second-highest number of lifetime recalls, with 17.7 times more than the industry-wide median. The Ford Maverick pickup and Ford Bronco SUV are the fourth and fifth most likely to be recalled, being 12.4 times and 9.4 times more likely to need remedial work, respectively.

In total, 12 different Ford models feature in the top 25 most frequently recalled vehicles list. At the other end of the table, a slew of Mercedes-Benz models feature among the least-recalled vehicles. Multiple models from BMW and Lexus also make an appearance.

Thanks to the increasing prevalence of over-the-air (OTA) updates, some recalls can be fixed remotely without the owner having to do anything. Unfortunately for Ford owners, many recalls will still require a trip to a dealer to fix, since the brand's models are still ranked the worst on the market when OTA recalls are excluded from the data.

Karl Brauer, executive analyst at iSeeCars, says that although OTA updates "can be nearly invisible to vehicle owners," choosing a vehicle with a lower predicted recall rate "can help buyers avoid the hassle" of dealing with recalls altogether. Meanwhile, Ford owners should expect to end up visiting their dealer for recall work far more frequently than owners of other car brands.