NHTSA Vehicle Recall, Complaint & Investigation Tracker – Auto Safety API

A NHTSA vehicle recall API and auto-safety data feed that pulls U.S. safety recalls straight from NHTSA's official recalls service by make, model and model-year, and normalizes each into a clean record: affected component, hazard, consequence, remedy, and report date. Use it to build a car recall lookup tool, a fleet-safety monitor, an insurance/underwriting signal, or a data feed for automotive journalism and dealer compliance.

Who uses it

Auto insurers and underwriters pricing vehicle risk, dealer groups and used-car marketplaces flagging open recalls on inventory, fleet and rideshare operators, product-liability and class-action law firms, and automotive-data products.

Why this is worth charging for

Open safety recalls are a legally-mandated, high-stakes signal: an unrepaired recall can affect resale value, insurance risk, and liability exposure. NHTSA publishes the data but only through a per-vehicle lookup with no structured, deduplicated, schedule-ready feed. This actor turns that lookup into an API you can run on a schedule across an entire inventory or fleet, charging only for genuinely new recalls.

Output

Each dataset item is one normalized record:

{
  "campaignNumber": "23V123000",
  "make": "HONDA",
  "model": "ACCORD",
  "modelYear": 2018,
  "manufacturer": "Honda (American Honda Motor Co.)",
  "component": "STEERING",
  "summary": "The steering gearbox may fail.",
  "consequence": "A loss of steering control increases the risk of a crash.",
  "remedy": "Dealers will inspect and replace the steering gearbox, free of charge.",
  "reportReceivedDate": "2023-05-12",
  "recallUrl": "https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls?nhtsaId=23V123000",
  "source": "NHTSA"
}

Input

Field	Description
make	One or more vehicle makes (comma-separated), e.g. HONDA, TOYOTA. Required — NHTSA looks up recalls by make + model + model year.
model	One or more models (comma-separated), e.g. ACCORD, CIVIC. Required.
yearFrom	Earliest model year to check. Defaults to last year.
yearTo	Latest model year to check. Defaults to the current year.
onlyNewSinceLastRun	Recommended for schedules — skips records already returned by a previous run using persisted state, so you're only charged for genuinely new items.
maxItems	Stop after this many normalized records.

Pricing (Pay-Per-Event)

• query — $0.02, charged once per run for the API query/poll.
• recall-record — $0.03 per normalized record pushed. This is the primary event.
• apify-actor-start (Apify-managed) — covers baseline compute per run.

Checking a whole fleet or dealership inventory across several model years typically returns a handful to a few dozen recalls, costing cents per run — with onlyNewSinceLastRun you only pay when a new recall actually appears.

Source & reliability

Data comes from NHTSA's official api.nhtsa.gov/recalls service — the same source that powers the government's recall lookup. No proxies or anti-bot handling required. Run npm test for the offline self-test covering the normalizer, including edge cases and missing-field handling.

FAQ

Is there an API for NHTSA recalls?

Yes — this actor is that API. Provide makes, models and a model-year range and every matching recall lands in a structured dataset you can pull via the Apify API, webhook or export.

How current is the data?

As current as NHTSA's own recalls service, which updates as manufacturers file new campaigns.

Can I monitor a whole fleet?

Yes. Pass comma-separated makes and models and a year range, run it on a schedule, and enable onlyNewSinceLastRun so you're only charged when a new recall appears.

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