Mercedes-Benz GL450 — what the federal data shows
2017–2017 · 0 federal complaints on file
Not enough complaints have been filed about this model to break them down by engine honestly — that needs at least 50 for a single engine. Everything we do have on it is below, from the same federal sources as every other page.
Ownership profile
Each axis is this model's percentile within its own segment — comparing a pickup's fuel economy against a compact car's would say nothing. Built from EPA test data.
19 MPG Fuel economy$4,000/yr Running cost480 g/mi Low emissions3.0 L Displacement
Method, sources and limitations
How this was built
- Source: NHTSA public complaint database (api.nhtsa.gov), retrieved 2026-08-16. Every complaint carries the first 11 characters of the vehicle's VIN.
- Those partial VINs were decoded through NHTSA's vPIC service to identify the exact engine — 98.2% resolved successfully. This is how the data gets to engine level; model-level ratings cannot do this.
- Percentages are the share of component mentions, not of complaints. One complaint can name several components, so the figures describe what a given engine's complaints are about — they do not sum to a failure rate.
What this does not tell you
- This is not a reliability ranking. Complaint totals track how many were sold, not how often they fail. Nobody publishes per-engine sales volume, so comparing totals between engines would be misleading. Read each engine's own breakdown; don't race them against each other.
- Engines with fewer than 50 complaints are omitted — too small to say anything honest about.
- Complaints are self-reported by owners. They skew toward problems that are alarming or expensive, and toward vehicles under active recall attention.
Compare with
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