Open enough filings in Japan's MLIT recall registry and you will notice something odd: many notifications name two, three, even four manufacturers at once. That is a joint filing, and it is anything but rare. Of the 4,890 notifications archived on this site (April 1993 – March 2026), 1,183 — 24.2% — name more than one manufacturer. Here is why the system works that way, what the numbers look like brand by brand, and what it means when you check a specific car.
Why one filing can name several brands
Japanese manufacturers routinely build vehicles for each other. One company engineers and assembles a model; partner companies sell the same vehicle under their own badges. The same happens at the component level, where several brands share a part from a common source. When a defect surfaces in a shared vehicle or component, the affected manufacturers notify MLIT together — one filing, one defect description, one set of serial ranges, several brand names at the top.
The co-filer lists in the archive point to two recurring patterns. One is commercial-vehicle relationships: Toyota's joint filings are mostly with Hino and Isuzu, and Nissan co-files most often with Nissan Diesel. The other is shared passenger-car platforms sold under several badges — the pattern behind the multi-million-vehicle examples below, where a single filing names three or four brands for what is mechanically the same vehicle.
For a buyer, the practical consequence is simple but easy to miss: the badge on the car does not tell you which filings apply to it.
The spread is enormous: Honda 4.0% vs Nissan 70.2%
How much a manufacturer co-files depends on how its production and supply relationships are structured, and the archive shows a remarkable range as of mid-2026:
| Manufacturer | Filings | Joint share | Most frequent co-filers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Honda | 528 | 4.0% | Isuzu |
| Toyota | 662 | 42.6% | Hino, Isuzu |
| Nissan | 922 | 70.2% | Nissan Diesel (317), Mitsubishi (289) |
| Nissan Diesel | 317 | 100% | Nissan (all 317) |
The extremes tell the story. Honda files alone 96% of the time. Nissan's record is dominated by joint notifications — 70.2% of its 922 filings name at least one other manufacturer. And every single one of Nissan Diesel's 317 filings in the archive is a joint filing with Nissan: a 100% joint record.
Three joint filings worth studying
Scale is what makes joint filings impossible to ignore. Three examples from the archive:
- Filing No. 1144870 — filed April 18, 2019 by four manufacturers at once (Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan and Suzuki), covering 2,021,590 vehicles in a single notification.
- Filing No. 1155400 — filed September 20, 2024 by Daihatsu, Subaru and Toyota for a seat issue, covering 1,710,607 vehicles including the CAST, PIXIS JOY, MOVE and RAIZE. This is the largest Toyota-named filing in the entire archive.
- Filing No. 1147610 — filed June 18, 2020 by Mazda, Nissan and Suzuki for an engine issue, covering 969,800 vehicles including the FLAIR, Wagon R and Spacia. It was the largest filing of 2020.
Notice what these have in common: kei cars and shared platforms sold under several badges. One mechanical defect, one filing, millions of vehicles across brand boundaries.
What joint filings mean when you check a car
- Don't search by badge alone. A Daihatsu-badged kei car can be covered by a filing that also names Toyota and Subaru, as filing No. 1155400 shows. If you browse only "your" brand's news sources, you can miss a filing that absolutely applies to your car.
- This archive attributes filings to every named manufacturer. A joint filing appears in the hub of each manufacturer it names, so browsing by make gives the complete picture whichever badge you start from.
- The decoder doesn't care about badges at all. The chassis lookup matches your model code and serial against the filing's recorded ranges — the brand name never enters the matching logic, so joint filings are found exactly like single-maker ones.
- Beware of double counting in statistics. Because 24.2% of filings are shared, adding up per-manufacturer filing counts overstates the national total. Our archive-wide totals — 4,890 filings, 203,048,907 vehicles listed — count each filing once.
Check your car across all brands at once
The clean way through all of this is to skip the badge and use the identifier the registry actually indexes: the chassis number. Run it through the free decoder and every applicable filing — joint or single-maker, statutory recall or improvement campaign — comes back in one report. If you are checking a car before an import purchase, the full sequence is in our step-by-step recall check guide.