For every car sold, owners filed about as many complaints about the 2014 Sonic as about the typical Sonic year. Among the 4 Sonic years with enough complaints to compare, owners filed the fewest about this one, the 2014 (0.46 per 1,000 sold) and the most about the 2012 (1.29).
Safety complaints filed by owners in the first three years, per 1,000 sold.
1.0 times this nameplate’s own median
Counted from 41 complaints filed in the first three years, of 150 ever. 95% lower bound 0.32.
The model year carries far more information than the badge, so this is the comparison that matters. The bar is how many complaints each rate rests on.
| Model year | Per 1,000 | Complaints | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 1.29 | 105 | |
| 2013 | 0.79 | 66 | |
| 2014 | 0.46 | 41 | |
| 2015 | 0.48 | 38 | |
| 2016 | 0.27 | 16 | |
| 2017 | 0.30 | 13 |
No phrase appears often enough in these complaints to describe them reliably.
Failures arrive late and spread out, which looks like wear. Service history matters more than model year here.
The VIN an owner files names the engine, which places 132 of this year’s 150 complaints. Sales by engine are not published, so these are not rates and say nothing about which engine drew more complaints. What can be compared is what each engine’s owners reported.
| Engine | Complaints | About the engine or fuel system | Of those, before 30,000 miles |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.8 L 4-cylinder | 90 | 31% | 38% of 24 |
| 1.4 L 4-cylinder turbo | 41 | 34% | too few mileages |
Engines as NHTSA’s VIN decoder (vPIC) reads them from the first eleven characters of each VIN. “Turbo” is shown only where every VIN records one; the decoder leaves it blank on many turbo engines. 19 complaints are not in the table: no usable VIN, an engine vPIC could not decode, or an engine with fewer than 25 complaints.
That is not a clean bill of health, and not a criticism of the agency: investigations open for many reasons and complaint volume is only one of them.
For every car sold, owners filed about as many complaints about the 2014 Sonic as about the typical Sonic year. Among the 4 Sonic years with enough complaints to compare, owners filed the fewest about this one, the 2014 (0.46 per 1,000 sold) and the most about the 2012 (1.29). The typical year is the median across its model years.
The parts owners named most often in complaints filed to date: Electrical System (49), Engine (38), Unknown Or Other (34).
Complaint records cannot settle that on their own. They count safety problems owners chose to report to the federal government, not every repair. What they do show is how this year compares with the other Sonic years: for every car sold, owners filed about as many complaints about the 2014 Sonic as about the typical Sonic year.
Among years with enough complaints to compare, the 2014, at 0.46 per 1,000 sold. Every Sonic year, ranked.
No guide we read covers the Sonic.
Example records behind this page, each on NHTSA’s own site: