Study: 23,000 Cars on Israel's Roads Have an Open Safety Recall
By Unbroken
How many cars in Israel are driving with an open safety recall?
As of August 2026, about 23,000 vehicles currently registered in Israel are driving with an open safety recall — one in every 179 cars on the road. The figures come from cross-referencing the government recall database with the national vehicle registry, both refreshed daily by Unbroken Car's data pipeline.
A recall is the manufacturer's own callback for a safety or technical defect, and the repair at the importer is always free. Yet tens of thousands of owners never show up. We matched the Ministry of Transport's open-recall file against the active vehicle registry to answer a simple question: how many of those recalls are on the road right now — and in which cars.
The headline numbers
23,229 vehicles registered in Israel today appear in the open-recall database — 0.56% of a fleet of roughly 4.16 million, or one in every 179 cars. Some carry more than one open recall.
The encouraging finding: the system works. Nearly all open recalls on active vehicles were opened in 2024–2026 (about 19,500 in 2025 alone). Older recalls on cars still in service barely exist — meaning most owners do repair within a year or two. The problem is the tail: thousands of cars left behind.
A surprising side-finding: the government recall file also lists about 93,700 vehicles with open recalls that are no longer in the active registry — mostly scrapped or exported cars. Their recalls will stay open forever, inflating any statistic that does not filter them out.
Brands with the most open recalls
In absolute numbers, Kia leads (4,760 active vehicles with an open recall), followed by Toyota (3,957), Citroën (3,799), Ford (2,164) and Hyundai (1,710). But absolute counts mislead — a bigger brand looks worse simply because it is bigger.
Normalized to fleet size, the picture flips: 4.7% of all active Citroëns in Israel carry an open recall — eight times the national average. Rover follows at 4.4% and Ford at 3.1%. At the other end, Hyundai and Audi sit at just 0.3% — even though Hyundai is one of Israel's largest brands.
The models topping the list
The Citroën Berlingo is the absolute-number champion: 2,821 active vehicles with an open recall — 7.4% of every Berlingo on the road. It is followed by the Kia Sportage (1,703), Kia Rio (1,230, or 5.2% of its fleet) and the Toyota Corolla hybrid sedan (1,217 — 8.7% of its fleet, the highest rate among high-volume models).
The rate record, though, belongs to the Volkswagen Transporter T5: a full third of the active fleet (33%) has an open recall — a 2025 airbag campaign covering 833 vehicles. If you drive a Transporter, odds are high this one is yours.
What is actually broken?
The largest fault category is engine and engine systems — 9,264 vehicles. The truly worrying slice is critical safety systems: 2,298 vehicles with an open airbag recall, 766 with seat-belt recalls, 561 with brake recalls and 192 with steering or suspension recalls — nearly 4,000 cars driving today with a known defect in a system meant to save lives.
The biggest recalls still open
The largest open campaign is a 2025 Citroën engine recall (Berlingo, C4, C5 Aircross and Jumpy) — 3,284 active vehicles still unrepaired. Next come a 2025 Toyota multi-model recall (2,785 vehicles across Camry, C-HR, Corolla, RAV4 and more), a Peugeot engine recall (1,267) and the Volkswagen Transporter airbag recall (833).
How do you check your own plate?
Enter your plate number in our free tool at unbrokencar.com/en/tools/recall-check — the result comes straight from the Ministry of Transport database and refreshes daily. If a recall is open, call the importer and book a slot. The repair is free, always.
Methodology: the analysis matches the Ministry of Transport open-recall file against the active vehicle registry (data.gov.il) by plate number, as of 21 August 2026. Per-model rates were computed only for models with at least 2,000 active vehicles. About 94,000 recall records belonging to vehicles no longer in the active registry were excluded from all figures above.