Public data.
Read with context.
We organize U.S. government vehicle safety information so you can research a used vehicle with clearer questions and better evidence.
Recalls are formal safety actions.
Manufacturers issue recalls for safety defects or noncompliance with federal motor vehicle safety standards. We display NHTSA campaign identifiers, summaries, consequences and remedies from the official recall dataset.
A recall associated with a year, make and model does not mean every vehicle in that group is affected. This report cannot determine whether a particular vehicle has an open recall or whether a repair was completed. Check the individual VIN with NHTSA or the manufacturer.
Complaints are consumer reports.
NHTSA complaints are reports submitted by consumers. They are not automatically verified defects, and they do not by themselves prove that a vehicle is unsafe or unreliable. We show narratives and deterministically aggregate the normalized records; no AI writes or interprets them.
Totals count unique ODI complaint identifiers within each vehicle report. A complaint can mention more than one component, so component percentages may add to more than 100%. Charts group complaints by their filing year, not the year of the reported incident. Undated complaints are counted separately.
Crash and fire totals count reports indicating those events. Injury and death totals sum the numbers reported in the complaints. Different complaints can describe the same event; these totals are not a verified count of unique incidents or people.
Source: NHTSA consumer complaint data.
Raw counts are not failure rates.
Complaint counts are not normalized for the number of vehicles sold and should not be interpreted as a reliability rate.
Vehicle sales, years on the road, miles driven and reporting behavior all affect raw totals. We do not have reliable exposure denominators in this MVP, so we do not calculate a proprietary safety score, reliability score, complaint rate or comparison winner. Low totals do not establish safety; high totals alone do not establish a defect.
Crash-test ratings describe tested configurations.
We display NHTSA’s 5-Star Safety Ratings for applicable configurations, including overall, frontal, side and rollover ratings. Choose the variant that matches the vehicle you are researching. We never average incompatible variants.
Missing ratings are not a negative safety signal. A crash-test rating covers the tests NHTSA performed and does not measure every safety characteristic or long-term reliability.
Investigations are a separate government process.
Formal defect investigations are different from both individual complaints and recalls. Investigation records are not integrated in this version. We label that gap explicitly and link to NHTSA’s official search. “Not integrated” does not mean there are no investigations.
Freshness, missing data and scope
Recalls and complaints normally refresh daily; crash-test ratings normally refresh weekly. Each section shows its last successful retrieval date and source. If an update fails, we retain previously synchronized information and identify it as stale. Unavailable data is not converted into zero.
The year, make and model selectors combine NHTSA’s recall and complaint product catalogs. These may not include vehicles without records in those datasets. Preloaded vehicles and suggested comparisons are editable development and editorial choices, not a statement about market popularity or an official competitor classification.
VIN privacy and site analytics
VIN searches are sent to the official vPIC API to decode available vehicle specifications. We do not permanently store entered VINs, send them to analytics or include them in application logs.
We use Vercel Web Analytics for anonymous, aggregate page-view statistics. It does not use third-party cookies or associate page views with an individual. The site has no accounts or advertising.
Direct VIN and contact fields are removed from complaint audit payloads. Recognizable VINs, email addresses and phone numbers are redacted from displayed narratives. Automated redaction cannot recognize every kind of personal information in free text.
Independent organization, official sources
Car Safety Facts is not affiliated with or endorsed by NHTSA. The underlying government data is not proprietary research. Our contribution is normalization, organization, deterministic analysis and usability. Follow the source links to inspect the government records.