About Car Record Book
Car Record Book puts the US government's vehicle safety records in one place for every make, model and model year since 1990.
Where the data comes from
- Safety recalls: NHTSA's recall database (Part 573 defect and noncompliance reports filed by manufacturers), including the problem, the risk, the fix and the number of vehicles affected.
- Owner complaints: reports the public files with NHTSA (vehicle owner questionnaires and other sources). They are not verified by NHTSA, and the crash, fire and injury counts are what the complainant reported.
- Defect investigations: NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation preliminary evaluations, engineering analyses and recall queries.
- Model names follow NHTSA's vehicle product information catalogue (vPIC).
All of this is public US government information, downloaded from NHTSA's datasets and refreshed weekly. We group records by make, model and model year but do not edit their content, except to shorten long complaint narratives. Different spellings of the same model in NHTSA's records (for example "4RUNNER" and "4 RUNNER") are combined. Counts come from NHTSA's bulk data files and can differ slightly from NHTSA's own website lookup, which groups some records differently.
Reading the numbers fairly
Complaint counts depend on how many vehicles were sold and how long they have been on the road, so a popular model will usually have more complaints than a rare one. Use them to see what kinds of problems owners report, not as a reliability ranking.
Car Record Book is independent and is not affiliated with NHTSA or any vehicle manufacturer. To check whether a specific car has an unrepaired recall, use its VIN at nhtsa.gov/recalls.
Who runs this site
Gloden Fan OÜ
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Email: info@glodenfan.com