Provenance
Where these records come from
Everything on this site is a US federal public record. Nothing is estimated, scored, or bought from a third party, and no manufacturer, dealer or insurer supplies or reviews any of it.
Each source below is re-checked every day. We ask the publisher whether the file has changed before downloading it, so an unchanged day costs a single conditional request rather than a re-transfer, and we keep the exact bytes of every file we did download so any figure on the site can be traced back to the release it came from.
| Dataset | Publisher | Refresh |
|---|---|---|
| Owner complaints Reports filed by owners. Unverified by NHTSA and not investigated unless a pattern emerges. The file lists a complaint once per component it cites, so we count each ODI number once. | NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation | Checked daily |
| Safety recalls Campaigns a manufacturer has conducted, with the defect, the risk it creates and the remedy offered. A recall is free to have performed regardless of the car's age. | NHTSA | Checked daily |
| Defect investigations Preliminary evaluations, engineering analyses and recall query actions. Most model years have none; an investigation means the regulator, not an owner, thought something was wrong. | NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation | Checked daily |
| Manufacturer communications Technical service bulletins sent to dealers. These are repair guidance, not defect findings, and a high count often means a manufacturer documents its work thoroughly. | NHTSA | Checked daily |
| Crash test ratings Frontal, side and rollover star ratings for the configurations NHTSA actually tested. Most model years were never tested, and an absent rating is not a poor one. | NHTSA New Car Assessment Program | Checked daily |
| Fuel economy City, highway and combined figures per drivetrain configuration, from 1984 onward. These are test-cycle results, not what a given car returns on a given road. | US EPA and US Department of Energy | Checked daily, republished by the EPA roughly annually |
What is not here
There are no prices, no reliability scores, no ownership-cost estimates and no editorial reviews. Those require either paid data or an opinion, and this site is built to be checkable against a government file.
Coverage also stops where the federal record does. Vehicles sold only outside the United States are absent, fuel-economy figures begin with the 1984 model year, and a model year with no complaints may genuinely have none or may simply be too new or too rare for anyone to have filed.
Reusing this data
The underlying records are US government works and are not subject to copyright. Our normalisation, matching and presentation are our own. If you cite a figure, cite the publisher and the date you retrieved it, and please link to the page you took it from.