Vehicle Safety Report — NHTSA Recalls + Complaints

A used-car buyer, dealer, or fleet manager currently checks recalls and complaints separately — NHTSA's own site requires two different lookups and returns raw lists with no combined verdict. Both are free, public, keyless. This combines them into one report per make/model/year: recall severity (NHTSA's own "do not drive" flag) and complaint patterns (crash/fire/injury/death counts, not a raw list to read one by one).

Input

{ "vehicles": [{ "make": "Honda", "model": "Accord", "modelYear": "2023" }] }

All three fields are required — NHTSA's API needs make, model, and year together to return results.

Sample output

{
  "make": "Honda",
  "model": "Accord",
  "modelYear": "2018",
  "recallCount": 6,
  "recallSeverity": "standard",
  "recallSeverityNote": "Recalls exist but none carry NHTSA's do-not-drive or park-outside flags.",
  "totalComplaints": 1863,
  "complaintsInvolvingCrash": 35,
  "complaintsInvolvingFire": 4,
  "totalDeathsReported": 0,
  "topComplaintComponents": "ENGINE (245); FORWARD COLLISION AVOIDANCE (149); FUEL SYSTEM, GASOLINE (132)"
}

The three recall severity levels

Severity	Meaning
do_not_drive	NHTSA's own flag — at least one recall says stop driving until repaired
park_outside_only	NHTSA's own fire-risk flag — park away from structures
standard	Recalls exist, no elevated NHTSA flag
none	No open recalls on file

Typical uses

• Used-car buying research — check a specific make/model/year before purchase, beyond just "how many recalls."
• Dealer inventory screening — flag inventory with do_not_drive or park_outside_only recalls before it's sold.
• Fleet management — audit a fleet's makes/models/years for open safety issues in bulk.
• Insurance/claims research — complaint patterns (crash/fire rates) are a real risk signal.

Pricing

$0.003 per vehicle report.

⚠️ Read before you act

• Complaint counts are model-year-wide, not VIN-specific. NHTSA doesn't offer VIN-level complaint lookup — this reflects the pattern across every 2018 Honda Accord filed with NHTSA, not confirmation any specific car has the issue. It's a real signal about that model-year, not a single-vehicle history report.
• Recall severity flags are NHTSA's own classification, passed through directly — never re-derived or guessed.
• This does not check open recalls for a specific VIN (NHTSA has a separate VIN-lookup endpoint not covered here) — it's a model-year-wide report.

FAQ

• Do I need an API key? No — NHTSA's API is free and keyless.
• Why do complaint numbers look high? NHTSA logs every consumer complaint nationwide for that model-year — even a well-regarded model can show hundreds or thousands over its production life. Compare crash/fire counts and top components, not the raw total, for a real risk read.
• What if my make/model/year has zero data? That's a real, valid answer — not every vehicle has recalls or logged complaints.

Related actors

• Recall Exposure Monitor — the same combined-official-feed pattern, for CPSC consumer product recalls instead of vehicles.
• Financial Complaint Monitor — the same crash/fire-style pattern aggregation, for CFPB financial complaints.