AtWhatMileage
Airbag · 4 owner reports

Seat belt or retractor failure on the 2023 Subaru Forester

Only 0 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.

Reports of this failure 4
With an odometer reading 0
Reports per 1,000 built 4.3 per 1,000
Filed below 36,000 miles 0%
Mention a crash, fire or injury 0
Typical repair $200–$900
What it means when it happens High
Rank among this year's problems 7th

When seat belt or retractor failure gets reported

There are 4 reports of seat belt or retractor failure on the 2023 Subaru Forester. That is too few to place the failure on the odometer with any confidence.

It is the 7th most-reported problem on this model year.

None of these reports included an odometer reading, so there is no mileage distribution to show. NHTSA's form does not require the field.

What happens, and what it costs

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 12 model years of this car. It shows up earliest on the 2020, at a median of 500 miles, and latest on the 2014 at 85,000 miles.

By volume the 2014 carries the most reports, with 25; the 2023 has 0. 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.

Median
  1. 1998 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure
    no odometer readings given
    —
  2. 1999 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure
    no odometer readings given
    —
  3. 2000 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure
    no odometer readings given
    —
  4. 2001 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 57k
  5. 2003 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 25k
  6. 2004 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 46k
  7. 2005 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 131k
  8. 2006 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure
    no odometer readings given
    —
  9. 2007 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 34k
  10. 2009 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 31k
  11. 2010 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 36k
  12. 2011 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 45k
  13. 2012 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 35k
  14. 2013 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 65k
  15. 2014 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 85k
  16. 2015 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 52k
  17. 2016 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 19k
  18. 2017 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 20k
  19. 2018 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 13k
  20. 2019 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 17k
  21. 2020 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure 500
  22. 2021 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure
    no odometer readings given
    —
  23. 2022 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure
    no odometer readings given
    —
  24. 2023 (this one)
    no odometer readings given
    —
  25. 2025 Subaru Forester seat belt or retractor failure
    no odometer readings given
    —

Tick median reported mileage Solid middle half of reports Faint 10th to 90th percentile Colour how bad the failure is when it happens

Also reported on the 2023 Subaru Forester

How far this goes

This page is kept out of search results because 4 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 4 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.

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