Which Major Car Brand Has Had The Least Amount Of Recalls Over The Last 10 Years?

Recalls are issued for several reasons, ranging from safety concerns to faulty mechanical components, and are a common occurrence, with the average car expected to be called four times over its life. Some manufacturers do better than others when it comes to recalls, though. According to NHTSA data as of June 2026, the major automaker with the fewest recalls over the past decade is none other than Japanese automaker Honda.

That's right, apparently the trope about Japanese efficiency is correct in this case. While manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz had more individual models with very few recalls, according to data presented by iSeeCars, Honda took the title for the fewest recalls across an entire product catalog — no doubt helped by only one vehicle from the past decade being among Honda's most recalled models. These statistics apply to all vehicles manufactured between 2016 and today, with Honda accumulating just 82 recalls against the staggering 402 racked up by Ford, the most recalled brand. The data lines up with the NHTSA 2025 Annual Report, which extrapolates these numbers against all other automakers.

What exactly constitutes a recall, in this case? Typically, there are multiple steps automakers take to ensure their cars remain on the road, such as recommended service intervals, automatic warning messages, and error codes to highlight faults. But sometimes the vehicles have problematic or failure-prone parts that need replacing. In those cases, automakers may issue a recall for affected cars. You can look up a list of these recalls (if your vehicle has any) on your manufacturer's website or the NHTSA official listing.

According to the data provided by the NHTSA, of the 82 recalls Honda issued in the past decade, the most common complaint rested in the engine and cooling systems, with a total of 11 recalls issued. These include relatively minor basic software glitches across a wide breadth of cars, such as one recall from May 2026 where 59,887 vehicles may have displayed a blank or distorted image in the backup camera. Then there are more specific recalls that involved a very small number of cars, such as a January 2026 recall for 32 cars that had improperly tightened front seat frames.

The relatively small variety of recalls only tells one half of the story, though — the actual number of cars affected by all of these defects was often staggering. For example, in April 2026, Honda recalled some 440,830 Odysseys because the airbags could unexpectedly deploy. Similarly, in October 2025, the automaker issued an even more alarming recall for 406,290 Civics that were at risk of a wheel falling off.

In other words, while Honda holds the title of the fewest recalls among the top 12 brands in the NHTSA report, it doesn't mean that it has the fewest vehicles with active recalls, nor does it describe how severe the recalls actually are. Granted, many of these issues are non-critical, but Honda has issued over a dozen recalls that have impacted millions of vehicles in recent years for problems related to everything from airbag ruptures to gearbox failure.