Why this site exists

The US government publishes an enormous amount about how cars fail. Every complaint an owner files, every recall campaign, every defect investigation, every bulletin a manufacturer sends its dealers, every crash test, every fuel-economy measurement. It is all public, all free, and almost none of it is usable by a person standing in front of a car deciding whether to buy it.

It arrives as six unrelated bulk files that name the same vehicle six different ways, with no shared identifier between them. Answering “what goes wrong with this car?” means downloading hundreds of megabytes and writing code.

CarFathom does that once a day and puts the result on one page per model year.

What it is not

It is not a review site and it does not score cars. There is no “reliability rating” here, because inventing one would mean turning a count of unverified reports into a number that looks authoritative and is not. What you get is the record, with the context needed to read it — which is mostly the warning that counts are reports, not rates.

It is independent. No manufacturer, dealer, insurer or government agency supplies, funds, reviews or endorses anything here.

How it is built

Six federal datasets are re-checked every day against their publishers. The exact bytes of every file we load are kept, so any figure on the site can be traced back to the release it came from, and a number that turns out to be wrong can be explained rather than merely corrected. Records that cannot be matched to a vehicle with confidence are left off the page instead of being attached to a car they might not belong to.

The sources page lists every dataset, and the methodology page explains what the numbers do and do not support.

Paying for it

The site reserves space for advertising and currently serves none. Nothing here is paid placement, and no figure changes based on who is advertising.

Corrections

If something here disagrees with the federal record, the federal record is right. Tell us which page and we will trace it. Get in touch.