Seat belt or retractor failure on the 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan
1 crash 1 injury 2 of the 11 reports for this failure mention a crash, a fire, an injury or a death. Those are the owner's words on the complaint form, not a verified finding, and one report can mention more than one.
Only 7 reports for this mode came with an odometer reading, which is too few for percentiles to mean anything. The page is here because someone linked to it; treat the figures as anecdotes, and see the full report for this year instead.
When seat belt or retractor failure gets reported
There are 11 reports of seat belt or retractor failure on the 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan, 7 with a mileage attached. That is too few to place the failure on the odometer with any confidence.
A part like this is normally expected to survive 82,000 miles. It is the 12th most-reported problem on this model year.
The whole distribution
| 10th | 25th | Median | 75th | 90th |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | 56,000 miles | — | — |
Read the 10th percentile as “one report in ten arrived this early”. Exact figures are shown in this table because it is the table of record; everywhere else on the site they are rounded to the precision the sample can carry.
What a percentile can and cannot tell you here
These five numbers describe the readings owners gave, in order. The median is the middle one: half the reports arrived below it. The 10th and 90th are the edges of the bulk of the distribution, and the distance between them is the part worth reading. A tight spread — say 70,000 to 95,000 miles — points at something that wears out on a schedule, and the schedule is knowable. A wide one, 20,000 to 190,000, points at a fault that hits some cars and never troubles others, which means the mileage on the listing in front of you tells you very little about your odds.
What these figures are not is a survival curve. Every reading here comes from a car whose owner filed a complaint, so the sample contains only failures: it cannot say what share of the fleet made it past 150,000 miles untouched, because those owners had nothing to report. Nor is the mileage the moment of failure — it is the odometer reading as recalled at the time of filing, which may be weeks later and is sometimes rounded to the nearest ten thousand by the person typing it.
Percentiles are shown at all only once 8 readings exist for the vehicle and mode. Below that the middle of a handful of numbers is noise wearing a decimal point, so the figures are withheld rather than dressed up.
What happens, and what it costs
Of these reports, 1 a crash and 1 an injury are mentioned. Owners write their own complaints and the agency does not verify them, so read this as what the reports say happened rather than as a confirmed count.
Putting it right typically runs $200–$900 at an independent US shop. That range is an editorial estimate held in this site's failure-mode catalogue, not a figure from NHTSA, and it is a repair cost rather than a diagnosis cost.
The same failure on other years
The same failure is reported on 20 model years of this car. It shows up earliest on the 2013, at a median of 10,000 miles, and latest on the 1997 at 145,000 miles.
By volume the 1998 carries the most reports, with 13; the 2016 has 11. A mode that appears across most years of a model is usually a design choice rather than a bad batch.
If one year stands out to the left, that is the year to avoid; if the whole line sits at a similar mileage, this is wear rather than a defect in one production run.
Tick median reported mileage Solid middle half of reports Faint 10th to 90th percentile Colour how bad the failure is when it happens
What owners wrote
Verbatim from NHTSA complaint narratives, trimmed for length. The mileage is the one the owner gave.
The 2016 dodge grand caravan was the direct cause of injury during appropriate and expected use of the vehicle. The vehicle did not malfunction. I was sitting in the middle left passenger's seat while the vehicle was in park. I was not wearing a seatbelt because the vehicle was off and in a safe parking lot. I attempted to engage the reclining function of the seat. The seat flew forward with extraordinary force upon engaging the recliner lever. The seats have stow-n-go, a mechanical feature that folds the seat into the floor for storage. The lever to engage stow-n-go and the lever to engage recline are the same lever, and there is no warning sign on the seat, in the vehicle, or in the owner's manual. The headrest folded forward, striking me in the back of the head and neck, and the seat struck my back. I received a concussion, whiplash, and permanent hearing damage and tinnitus due to the impact. Medical treatment is ongoing to determine severity of compressed nerves and damage to bone, with symptoms persisting five months after and are considered to continue persisting for months by medical professionals because of the trauma…
The middle bench seat is not wide enough to safely hold an infant car seat even though it has a latch system for the car seat. The infant car seat hangs off the seat and is not safely supported by the seat an chrysler has no safe alternative to fix the safety issue. Also since it's a bench seat you cannot use the seatbelt that crosses the walkway for any car seat because this is also a safety issue that chrysler does not have a resolution for. These issues are when the vehicle is stationary, and in motion on any city street or highway, turning, or traveling straight. Chrysler does not care if parents can safely secure a car seat of any kind in their vehicles. Instead they tell you to read the manual for the car seat and for the vehicle you purchased and that's it.
The middle bench seat is not wide enough to safely hold an infant car seat even though it has a latch system for the car seat. The infant car seat hangs off the seat and is not safely supported by the seat an chrysler has no safe alternative to fix the safety issue. Also since it's a bench seat you cannot use the seatbelt that crosses the walkway for any car seat because this is also a safety issue that chrysler does not have a resolution for. These issues are when the vehicle is stationary, and in motion on any city street or highway, turning, or traveling straight. Chrysler does not care if parents can safely secure a car seat of any kind in their vehicles. Instead they tell you to read the manual for the car seat and for the vehicle you purchased and that's it.
Also reported on the 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan
Other electrical problem
Other body or interior problem
Other powertrain problem
Ignition switch, key fob or immobilizer failure
Door latch or handle failure
Other engine problem
How far this goes
This page is kept out of search results because 11 reports is not enough to publish percentiles from. It stays reachable because somebody looking at this exact car would rather see the reports than be told there are none.
Complaints are voluntary, so 11 is a floor and not a count of affected cars. Mileages are typed in by owners and cluster on round numbers. And the mode itself is assigned by software reading the complaint text, which is reliable in bulk and fallible one report at a time.
Questions this page answers
At what mileage does seat belt or retractor failure happen on the 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan?
Across 7 owner reports that included an odometer reading, half were filed by 55,000 miles. A quarter were filed before — and a quarter after —. These are the mileages owners reported when they complained, not a prediction for any individual car.
How common is seat belt or retractor failure on the 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan?
11 reports have been filed with NHTSA, about 2.5 per 1,000 vehicles. Complaints are voluntary, so this is a floor rather than a count of affected cars.
What this is and is not. These are the mileages at which owners chose to complain to a federal agency, which is not the same as the mileage at which the part fails on every car. It skews toward failures that happened outside warranty, cost real money, or frightened someone. It is still the only public dataset that carries failure mileage at all, and the shape of a few hundred readings is informative even when a single one is not. Methodology · JSON · this failure on other cars
Source Owner complaints and recall records published by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, model years 1996–2027 Figures rebuilt Published by AtWhatMileage How every figure is computed