Every recall record and vehicle specification on this site comes from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This page explains what is included, how records are organized, and the limits of each tool.
Recall pages: inclusion criteria
A page exists only where NHTSA's recall file contains at least one campaign. Specifically, a record is included when all of these hold:
- it is a vehicle recall (NHTSA record type “V”), not tires, child seats or equipment;
- the model year is between 2015 and 2027;
- the make is one of 32 brands with significant U.S. sales of cars, SUVs, vans and pickups;
- the model name in the record matches one of 368 editorial model groups (for example, “RAV4”, “RAV4 HYBRID” and “RAV4 PRIME” form the Toyota RAV4 group).
Motorcycles, heavy trucks and chassis cabs, buses, police-only versions and low-volume exotics are left out, as are model names NHTSA itself labels “redundant” or “duplicate” and a few ambiguous names (for example Audi “ALLROAD”, used for different models in different years). A campaign recorded only under an excluded name does not appear on these pages, so a model-year page lists the campaigns filed under its model names, not necessarily every campaign that could touch the vehicle. Excluded names are listed in the project's coverage audit with the number of campaigns each one has. Where NHTSA records a pickup without its series (“SILVERADO”, “SIERRA”), those campaigns get their own “series not listed” pages rather than being guessed into 1500 or heavy-duty pages. For anything not covered, the live recall lookup asks NHTSA's API directly.
The result: 3,620 campaigns on 2,668 model-year pages. There are no pages for model years without a campaign, no pages per VIN, and no pages generated from search terms.
How a record is shown
NHTSA's file has one row per campaign, model, model year and component. Rows are combined into one record per campaign. Each record shows the campaign number, report-received date, owner-notification date, who initiated it, the number of units potentially affected (for the whole campaign, across all models), the components, and NHTSA's defect summary, consequence and remedy text unchanged. The build-date range shown on a model-year page is the earliest start and latest end NHTSA lists for that model year. Every record links to the campaign on NHTSA.gov.
Do-not-drive and park-outside badges come from NHTSA's consumer advisory fields in the same file.
VIN decoder
The first check runs only in your browser: length, allowed characters, the position-9 check digit and the position-10 model-year code, all as defined in 49 CFR Part 565. The world manufacturer identifier is compared with a table of 413 codes saved from NHTSA vPIC. Full specifications come from NHTSA's vPIC API, requested by your browser only when you press the button. vPIC values are shown as returned; the site does not add or infer equipment.
What the site does not do
- It does not report whether a specific VIN has an unrepaired recall. That status is held by manufacturers and shown through NHTSA's VIN search.
- It does not provide vehicle history (title, accidents, mileage, ownership) or market values.
- It does not rate or rank vehicles. Recall counts reflect campaigns filed, which depend on how many vehicles and model variants exist; they are not a reliability score.
Editorial content
Guides are written for this site from the primary sources listed at the end of each one: federal regulations, U.S. Code and NHTSA publications. They have not been reviewed by NHTSA or a lawyer. Publication and review dates appear on each guide; data dates appear on each data page. Rebuilding the site does not change a guide's review date.
See also sources and data and the update policy.