Vehicle Recalls Monitor (NHTSA Open Data)

Get US vehicle safety recalls as clean, structured JSON, straight from the official NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) public API. Check which recalls affect a make, model and model year, or scan whole makes and get one row per recall campaign: campaign number, component, summary, consequence, remedy, park-it and over-the-air-update flags.

No API key, login or proxy needed. The data is US government open data.

Why use it?

• Used-car dealers and auction buyers: check a VIN-less stock list (make, model, year) for open recalls before you buy or list a car.
• Parts sellers and body shops: watch new recalls on the components you sell or repair (AIR BAGS, BRAKES, FUEL SYSTEM, STEERING).
• Fleet and leasing managers: monitor every model in your fleet and get alerted to "park it" or "park outside" recalls.
• Insurers' data teams, journalists, researchers: build a recall dataset by make and year.
• Automations: schedule weekly with reportedAfter set, and feed new recalls to Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets, Slack or an AI agent.

What it does

• Looks up recalls for explicit vehicles (make + model + modelYear).
• Or scans whole makes: give makes and modelYears and the Actor lists every model with recalls for those years, then fetches all of them.
• Filters by report date (reportedAfter) and by component text (componentContains).
• De-duplicates campaigns per vehicle and stops at maxResults.

Input example

{
  "vehicles": [{ "make": "Toyota", "model": "Camry", "modelYear": 2020 }],
  "makes": ["Tesla"],
  "modelYears": ["2023"],
  "reportedAfter": "2022-01-01",
  "componentContains": "AIR BAGS",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Output sample

One dataset row per recall campaign and vehicle (text shortened here):

{
  "campaignNumber": "20V682000",
  "make": "TOYOTA",
  "model": "CAMRY",
  "modelYear": 2020,
  "manufacturer": "Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing",
  "reportReceivedDate": "2020-11-04",
  "component": "FUEL SYSTEM, GASOLINE:DELIVERY:FUEL PUMP",
  "summary": "Toyota is recalling certain 2018-2020 Camry ... The low-pressure fuel pump inside the fuel tank may fail.",
  "consequence": "If the fuel pump fails, the engine can stall while driving, increasing the risk of a crash.",
  "remedy": "Toyota will notify owners, and dealers will replace the fuel pump assembly ... free of charge.",
  "notes": "Owners may also contact the NHTSA Vehicle Safety Hotline at 1-888-327-4236 ...",
  "parkIt": false,
  "parkOutside": false,
  "overTheAirUpdate": false,
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls?nhtsaId=20V682000",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-10-21T12:11:53+00:00"
}

Output fields

campaignNumber, make, model, modelYear, manufacturer, reportReceivedDate (ISO date), component, summary, consequence, remedy, notes, parkIt, parkOutside, overTheAirUpdate, sourceUrl (NHTSA recall page), fetchedAt.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.002 per recall record pushed to the dataset ($2 per 1,000 records). No charge for empty lookups and no monthly rental. Set a maximum cost per run in Apify to cap spending; the run stops cleanly when the limit is reached.

Data source and limits

• Data comes from the public NHTSA recalls API (api.nhtsa.gov), US government open data. Coverage is US-market vehicles only. For Canada see the sister Actor Canada Vehicle Recalls Monitor (Transport Canada Open Data).
• The Actor reads public data only, calls the API politely (small delay between requests, retries on temporary errors) and stores no personal data.
• Not affiliated with or endorsed by NHTSA. This is not legal or safety advice; always confirm a recall on nhtsa.gov or with the manufacturer.

Search terms

NHTSA recalls API, vehicle recall lookup, car recall checker, safety recall database, recall by make model year, auto recall monitor, airbag recall, fleet recall alerts, used car recall check, US vehicle recalls dataset.

AI transparency

The Actor performs deterministic querying, filtering and formatting. It does not call a generative AI model. Its source and listing were prepared with AI assistance (Claude) and reviewed by the publisher. Issues and feature requests are welcome in the Actor's Issues tab.