One of our test vehicles — a well-loved Ford Ranger — has eleven open recalls from the regulator. Each one is genuinely distinct: different components, different remedies. Until this week, that meant eleven near-identical cards at the top of the dashboard, burying everything else the household needed to see. Accurate, and useless.
Group by the thing, count honestly
Alerts about the same thing now collapse to a single row with a count — "Recall: Ford Ranger ×11." The count isn't decoration: it's the promise. Dismissing the row dismisses all eleven, and the card says so before you tap. Each individual recall still lives on the vehicle's own page, where you can acknowledge them one at a time with the full detail in front of you.
Severity beats recency
The list used to be ordered by whatever happened last, which meant a safety recall could sit below a chore nobody had done. Now severity wins: recalls and emergency-access requests first in red, overdue items in amber below them, gentle reminders last. The strip's edge takes the color of the worst thing present, so a recall buried under three reminders still turns the whole indicator red — on the web, on your phone, and on the kitchen display alike.
An alert wall isn't information. One honest row with a count is.