No. 44 · published Aug 18, 2026
LemonBench
LemonBench flags which model years of a used car to avoid, drawn from NHTSA's public complaint, recall and investigation records. It refuses to rank one model against another — complaint counts have no sales figures behind them, so each year is scored only against its own siblings.
Palette
Notes
Near-black throughout with amber as the only accent, and that amber does double duty: it marks the wordmark and the data stamp, then carries the actual information in the trouble strip — a row of one narrow bar per model year, brighter where owners reported more. Every card in the grid of twenty-four models leads with that strip, so the shape of a car’s history registers before a word is read. A condensed geometric sans holds the headline to two tight lines, and three numbered cards teach the reading order before the grid starts. Unusually quiet for a used-car site.
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