Frequently asked questions

Phantom braking is when a car’s emergency brake assist or adaptive cruise control suddenly brakes although there is nothing to brake for. It often happens at overpasses, shadows, overhead signs or next to a truck in the adjacent lane. Since July 2024 automatic emergency braking (AEB) is mandatory in every new car in the EU, so more and more drivers run into it.

An independent initiative. We are not affiliated with car makers, importers, dealers, insurers or governments. Who runs it and how to get in touch is in the privacy statement.

Manufacturers don’t have to register false braking events anywhere and don’t share their vehicle data. Official reports barely exist. Bundling reports with make, model, location and circumstances reveals patterns: which cars, which places, which situations.

No. Please also report a dangerous vehicle to the Dutch ILT and to your dealer, so it is officially on record. In an accident with injuries, always call 112.

Not directly. Reports are drivers’ experiences; we don’t verify them technically. A model that sells well, or has an engaged group of owners, naturally gets more reports. Use the figures to spot patterns, not as proof that a vehicle is defective.

No. You don’t need an account and we don’t ask for your name or email address. Submitting a report takes about three minutes.

For now, cars with a Dutch licence plate, because we fetch the vehicle details automatically from the RDW (the Dutch vehicle authority). Other countries don’t (yet) have a public plate register we can use.

Yes. The country of the plate and the country where it happened are separate. Click the spot on the map and we fill in the country and road for you.

Yes, if you experienced it yourself as an occupant of the car. Report each incident only once per car. Never fill in the report while driving.

Choose what fits best, or “Nothing visible” or “Other”, and describe it in the comments. An incomplete report still helps: the place, the car and the circumstances are often enough to see a pattern.

No. We only use the plate to fetch the vehicle details from the RDW. After that we keep only an irreversible fingerprint (made with a secret key), so we can count repeat reports of the same car. The plate itself is never stored or shown.

It gets us the exact make, model, year and type approval from the RDW, without typos. Those details are what make it possible to see whether a problem belongs to a specific model or software version.

They stay private until a moderator has reviewed them. We remove metadata such as the GPS location. You black out plates on photos when uploading, and the moderator checks that. We don’t publish dashcam footage with a readable plate.

Open your report via Reports and request deletion of the footage and photos there by entering the plate. If it matches, a moderator deletes them.

Yes. Get in touch using the details in the privacy statement. The report is then also removed from the statistics.

Reports are published without the plate and included in the statistics on this site. What we publish may be used by others, such as researchers, journalists and regulators, with attribution. See the terms of use.

Yes. The source code is open source (MIT licence) and available on GitHub. You can check for yourself how we handle plates and footage.