- Mitsubishi has issued just 150 US recalls since its 1987 NHTSA debut.
- Ford filed 153 recall actions last year alone, an all-time industry record.
- Only eight Mitsubishi recalls have been issued since the start of 2022.
Ford owners have started checking NHTSA the way other people check the weather. Anything with a Blue Oval and four wheels seems to qualify these days. That got us wondering about the other end of the table. After writing up Mitsubishi’s latest action this week and noticing it was the first in months, we went digging.
Pull up four decades of NHTSA paperwork and one mass-market brand keeps failing to turn up. Mitsubishi’s American recall record is unusually thin. Counting from its first filing in 1987, five years after it split from Chrysler to operate as its own entity in the States, the tally sits at just 150 actions covering roughly 7.6 million vehicles. No other mainstream brand that has been selling here the whole time comes close. Put another way, 150 recall actions in four decades, against the 153 Ford managed last year alone.
More: Ford Recalled More Cars Than The Next 9 Brands Combined In 2025
A few caveats here. Suzuki logged most of its 112 actions before its 2012 exit from America, with a few more since for vehicles still on the road. Tesla sits at 90, though across barely a decade as a recall-issuing entity, which pushes its annualized rate past several legacy luxury brands.
Sparse Recall Record
For Mitsubishi, some years pass without a single recall, 2024 being the most recent example, while others barely register on the agency’s radar. Even the busy years are quiet by industry standards. The peak came in 2000, with just over one million vehicles affected, though that figure is skewed by a single 567,432-unit lower ball joint boot recall. Strip that out, and the year looks fairly unremarkable.
The brand’s only sustained busy stretch came between 2014 and 2018, when Mitsubishi averaged eight recalls a year for five straight years. Since then, all we hear is crickets. Mitsubishi has issued just eight recalls since the start of 2022, and only 16 since January 2020.
Its two most recent actions relate to the liftgate gas springs (2026 and 2025), while the two before those, one in 2025 and another in 2023, were tied to rearview camera failures. The brand’s most recent powertrain-related recall came in August 2022 over a software error causing engines to stall. The busiest year of the current decade was 2020, with five recalls covering more than 361,000 vehicles.
Top 3 Most Recalled US Automakers 1987-2026
Ford, on the other hand, operates on an entirely different scale, with a record 153 actions logged in 2025, the most ever issued by any automaker in a single calendar year. Yes, the Blue Oval currently sells around 22 times as many vehicles in the US as Mitsubishi, but sales volume explains how many vehicles are affected, not how often recalls are issued. Ford filed more recall actions in 2025 alone than Mitsubishi has issued across the past 40 years combined.
During the same 40-year stretch, from 1987 through late April this year, the order is what you’d expect. Ford leads the scoreboard 1,285 recall actions and 186,836,824 vehicles affected. GM is right behind on 1,238 actions and 153,490,426 vehicles. Stellantis, in its various Chrysler and FCA corporate forms, rounds out the podium with 1,046 actions covering 131,903,517 cars.
Mitsubishi US Recalls 1990-2026
Source NHTSA
