It was a bad year for the safety department at Ford, as the automaker was the biggest recaller of 2022. The American manufacturer was responsible for a full 17 percent of all recalls over the last 12 months.
The revelation comes after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) published its annual data on recalls for the year. It found that, in all, Ford was responsible for 67 different recall campaigns in 2022, the majority of which were related to the powertrain.
That put it ahead of Volkswagen, which came in second with 45 recalls (11% of the total), Daimler Trucks, which had 42 recalls, Chrysler, which had 38, and Forest River, a company that specializes in the manufacture of commercial trucks, shuttle buses, and RVs, some of which are based on Ford vehicles, which had 35.
Read: Ford Recalls Nearly 3 Million Cars Over Rollaway Risk Linked To Four Alleged Injuries
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that Ford is also the company that had to recall the most individual vehicles. The total number of recalls, though, did not always correlate perfectly with the total number of vehicles recalled.
Although they were in the top five for number of recalls, Forest River, Daimler, and VW, weren’t the five brands with the most recalled vehicles by total. Instead, Tesla was the manufacturer with the second vehicles recalled by total. The EV manufacturer was plagued by tech issues this year, a large proportion of which were solved by over-the-air updates. Tesla was followed by GM, Chrysler, and Kia America rounded out the top five.
Helping Ford to maintain its dubious twin titles, though, was one particularly massive recall. Its largest recall potentially included a massive 2.9 million vehicles for a rollaway risk related to the shift cable. By comparison, the automaker with the second-largest single recall, was RAM, and it was less than half as large, at 1.2 million vehicles in the U.S. for an issue with the tailgate.
Tesla, too, had a recall that potentially affected over a million vehicles, as well as another that affected more than 800,000. BMW split those two recalls, though, to come in with the fourth-largest recall of 2022, which affected more than 900,000 vehicles for a fire risk.
Additional reporting by John Halas