Data sources
Everything on this site comes from public U.S. federal records. Nothing is scraped from other websites, and nothing is generated. You can download the same files and check our arithmetic.
NHTSA consumer complaints
Reports filed by vehicle owners with the Office of Defects Investigation, published as the FLAT_CMPL flat file. Each record carries the component, incident date, odometer reading, whether a crash or fire occurred, how many people were hurt, and the owner's own description. Our copy holds 1,569,818 of them.
NHTSA safety recalls
Part 573 defect and noncompliance reports filed by manufacturers, published as the FLAT_RCL_PRE_2010 and FLAT_RCL_POST_2010 files. Each record carries the campaign number, affected units, the defect and its consequence, the remedy, and any do-not-drive or park-outside advisory. Our copy holds 21,880 campaigns.
vPIC VIN decoder
The VIN lookup queries NHTSA's vPIC service live at the moment you submit a VIN, so it always reflects the current decoder. We do not store submitted VINs.
Get the originals
All three are published at NHTSA Datasets and APIs, together with the field layout documents that define every column.
Licence
U.S. government works, published without copyright. Our presentation, wording and derived figures are our own; the underlying records are public domain.
Found a figure here that does not match the source? That is a bug and we want to hear about it — report it.