Vehicle Recalls and Complaints (NHTSA)

Look up US vehicle safety recalls and owner complaints from NHTSA by make, model, and year, or by VIN. Official NHTSA data.

What it does

• Fetches safety recalls (campaign number, component, summary, consequence, remedy, report date) for each vehicle.
• Fetches owner complaints (ODI number, component, summary, crash, fire, injuries, deaths, incident date) for each vehicle.
• Accepts vehicles as make, model, and year, or as VINs. VINs are decoded to make, model, and year with the NHTSA vPIC decoder before lookup.
• Normalizes all dates to YYYY-MM-DD and exports flat records to a dataset, plus a run summary in the OUTPUT key-value store record.

Input

Field	Type	Description
vehicles	array	Vehicles to look up. Each entry is {"make": "Tesla", "model": "Model 3", "year": 2022}.
vins	array	VINs to look up. Each VIN is decoded to make, model, and year, then queried like a vehicle.
include	array	Record types to fetch: recalls, complaints, or both. Defaults to both.
maxItems	integer	Cap on the total number of records across all vehicles. Default 500, max 10000.

At least one vehicle or one VIN is required.

Example:

{
  "vehicles": [{ "make": "Tesla", "model": "Model 3", "year": 2022 }],
  "include": ["recalls", "complaints"]
}

Output

One dataset item per recall or complaint. The source field says which one it is, and the shared component, summary, and date fields work for both. A recall record:

{
  "source": "recall",
  "make": "Tesla",
  "model": "Model 3",
  "year": 2022,
  "vin": null,
  "campaignNumber": "24V376000",
  "component": "SEAT BELTS:FRONT:WARNING LIGHT/DEVICES",
  "summary": "Tesla, Inc. (Tesla) is recalling certain 2012-2024 Model S, 2015-2024 Model X, 2017-2023 Model 3, and 2020-2023 Model Y vehicles.  In the event of an unbelted driver, the seat belt warning light and audible chime may not activate as intended.  As such, these vehicles fail to comply with the requirements of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard number 208, \"Occupant Crash Protection.\"",
  "consequence": "A seat belt warning system that fails to alert occupants of an unbelted seat belt can increase the risk of injury during a crash.",
  "remedy": "Tesla will release an over-the-air (OTA) software update.  Owner notification letters were mailed July 26, 2024.  Owners may contact Tesla customer service at 1-877-798-3752.  Tesla's number for this recall is SB-24-00-008.",
  "reportDate": "2024-05-28",
  "overTheAirUpdate": true,
  "date": "2024-05-28"
}

Complaint records use source: "complaint" and carry odiNumber, crash, fire, injuries, deaths, incidentDate, and filedDate instead of the recall-specific fields. The vin field is set only for records that came from a VIN lookup.

Pricing

Pay per result, plus standard Apify platform usage.

Data source

Official NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) public APIs: the recalls API, the complaints API, and the vPIC VIN decoder at api.nhtsa.gov and vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov. No API key is needed. The endpoints return the full result set per vehicle in a single response, and the Actor retries rate-limit and server errors with backoff. NHTSA covers US-market vehicles only.