One in nine car recalls is now a software download, from NHTSA's recall data

A recall used to mean a letter, a phone call and a morning at the dealer. More and more often now it means the car downloads a file overnight. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration records every US recall campaign since 1966 and, for the recent ones, whether the remedy is an over-the-air update. We counted. The answer is that the software recall went from a Tesla curiosity to one in nine light-vehicle recalls in six years, and that this year Tesla is barely in the picture.

Two sources, both free and keyless: NHTSA's own recalls API, in the index as nhtsa, and the agency's recall dataset on data.transportation.gov. The API answers questions about one vehicle at a time. The dataset answers questions about all of them.

Finding the software recalls

The API is the one most people meet. Give it a make, model and year and it returns that vehicle's recalls:

GET https://api.nhtsa.gov/recalls/recallsByVehicle?make=tesla&model=model%203&modelYear=2024

{"Count": 5, "Message": "Results returned successfully", "results": [
  {"Manufacturer": "Tesla, Inc.", "NHTSACampaignNumber": "24V554000", "overTheAirUpdate": true,
   "parkIt": false, "parkOutSide": false, "ReportReceivedDate": "24/07/2024",
   "Component": "LATCHES/LOCKS/LINKAGES:HOOD:LATCH",
   "Remedy": "Tesla has released an over-the-air (OTA) software update, free of charge. ...", ...}, ...]}

Two of the 2024 Model 3's five recalls carry overTheAirUpdate: true: a hood latch that could fail to detect an unlatched hood, and a tire-pressure warning that did not persist between drives, both fixed by an update. That flag is the thing we wanted to count, but the API has no endpoint for all recalls, only lookups by vehicle or by campaign number. The dataset fills the gap: one row per campaign, 30,342 of them through October 1, 2026, including the full text of the remedy. So the definition became: a vehicle recall whose corrective-action text says the fix is over the air.

Then we checked the definition against the flag, campaign by campaign, with 1,720 calls to recalls/campaignNumber: every recall since 2015 whose remedy text mentions software, firmware, updates or reflashing, every Tesla recall, and a random control sample of 300 recalls that mention none of those words. Through 2024 the flag and the wording agree on 89 of 91 campaigns, and not one of the 300 controls is flagged. Then the flag goes dark. It is set on 4 of the 38 over-the-air recalls of 2025 and none of the 33 so far in 2026; the last flagged campaign was filed in May 2025. The field is still in the API. Nobody fills it in any more, which is why the chart below counts words rather than flags.

Among the car and light-truck makers, who file about a third of all vehicle recalls (the rest are RVs, trailers, trucks, buses and motorcycles), the over-the-air share has gone from 1.5% in 2020 to 11.5% this year. Counted by vehicles instead of campaigns the share is bigger: the 33 software recalls of 2026 cover 7.6 million vehicles, 23% of every vehicle recalled this year, and 2024 was also 23%. Nearly a quarter of recalled vehicles now get their fix without visiting anyone.

It isn't Tesla any more

The first over-the-air recall in the data is Tesla's, in January 2014, for a charger that could overheat. The second is Mercedes-Benz, in November 2019, for cars that reported the wrong location to emergency services, and the third is General Motors in August 2020. For a while it was mostly Tesla: 12 of the 22 software recalls of 2022. Then everyone else learned. Tesla filed 3 of 38 in 2025 and 1 of 33 in 2026. Over the whole period it has 32 of the 157, and 40% of its own recalls were fixed over the air; Ford has 23, with eight in each of the last two years, General Motors 18, Lucid 11 (half of all its recalls), Hyundai 10. Thirty-one manufacturers have now filed at least one.

What gets fixed this way is mostly screens and cameras. Forty of the 157 campaigns are filed under back-over prevention, the rearview camera system: a display that fails to show the image, or shows it too late, which violates the federal standard for backup visibility. Most of the rest sit under the electrical system, where the common sub-components are instrument clusters and plain software. The largest recall ever to carry an over-the-air remedy is this February's: Ford, 4.4 million vehicles whose trailer lights and brakes could stop working, with the fix offered at a dealer or as a download.

The most recalled part of a car is now the electrical system

Each campaign is filed under a component. In 2000 the electrical system accounted for 6% of them and ranked ninth. In 2025 it was 21% and ranked first, as it has every year since 2023. The dataset records only the top level of the component path, and 10 to 25 percent of campaigns in a given year have none at all, so the exact shares move around; the direction does not.

The recall year, in context

The number of campaigns roughly quadrupled between 1990 and the record of 988 in 2021 and has stayed near 900 since. The 2014 to 2016 spike in vehicles is the General Motors ignition switch and the Takata air bag inflators, around 50 million vehicles a year. 2026 is on a slower pace in campaigns, 611 by October 1 against 642 at the same point last year, but a much faster one in vehicles: 32.7 million already, more than all of 2025 and 57% ahead of last year's first nine months. Two more things stand out in the recent years. Ford filed 146 recalls in 2025, more than double its 62 of 2024 and more than any manufacturer has filed in a year. And the “park outside” advisory, attached to recalls where a parked vehicle could catch fire, has gone from 7 campaigns in 2020 to 19 by October 1 this year, already within one of the 2023 record.

Notes for anyone building on it

• No key for either source. api.nhtsa.gov has recalls/recallsByVehicle (make, model, modelYear), recalls/campaignNumber, and products/vehicle/makes and products/vehicle/models to enumerate what exists for a model year (issueType=r for recalls). Every response is {"Count", "Message", "results"}, except that the products endpoints spell the first two keys in lower case.
• One campaign comes back as one row per make, model and model year it covers. De-duplicate on NHTSACampaignNumber before counting anything. recallsByVehicle needs all three of make, model and model year, and the model string has to match NHTSA's own spelling, so list the models for a make and year first (and de-duplicate that list too; it repeats entries).
• ReportReceivedDate is day/month/year. Component is a colon-separated path (ELECTRICAL SYSTEM:SOFTWARE); the dataset keeps only the first segment.
• overTheAirUpdate, parkIt and parkOutSide are reliable through mid-2025. After that the over-the-air flag is almost never set; read the remedy text instead.
• Responses took 0.7 seconds at the median and 1.3 at the 90th percentile over 1,730 calls, with one 30-second outlier. We ran three at a time without a single 429.
• For aggregates use the dataset: https://data.transportation.gov/resource/6axg-epim.json, a Socrata endpoint that accepts SoQL. $select=date_trunc_y(report_received_date) AS yr, count(*), sum(potentially_affected)&$where=recall_type='Vehicle'&$group=yr is the whole yearly chart in one request. Pages are 5,000 rows; the full table is seven of them.
• Filter on recall_type: the table also holds equipment, tire and child-seat recalls. “Potentially affected” is the manufacturer's estimate when it filed, and one campaign can span several makes.
• The two sources agree. Across the 1,720 campaigns we pulled from both, unit counts and report dates matched on every one.

The listing at /api/nhtsa has the base URL and the docs link. It is unclaimed. If you work at NHTSA, it's yours.

Source: NHTSA Recalls Data (data.transportation.gov dataset 6axg-epim, one row per Part 573 campaign) and api.nhtsa.gov recalls/campaignNumber for the over-the-air, park-outside and component fields, pulled October 8, 2026, latest report received October 1, 2026. An over-the-air recall is a vehicle campaign whose corrective-action text describes the remedy as over the air. Light-vehicle makers are the 39 car and light-truck manufacturers that file with NHTSA.