About RecallScanner

RecallScanner is an independent, privately operated reference site that turns the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's public vehicle-safety data into something normal drivers and used-car buyers can actually use. We are not NHTSA. We are not a dealer, a law firm, or an automaker. We build software, read government APIs, and try to make the answers you need take seconds instead of an afternoon.

Why this site exists

The U.S. has one of the most comprehensive vehicle-safety data systems in the world, and almost none of it is presented in a way regular people want to use. NHTSA's own recall lookup works, but it's built for a small set of use cases: one VIN at a time, one campaign at a time, with little cross-reference between models, brands, or historical patterns. Dealer and insurer tools are closed. Third-party tools either gate the data behind a paywall or bury it under upsells.

We started RecallScanner because every time we bought a used car, checked a friend's recall status, or tried to research a model's track record before a road trip, we ended up copy-pasting between multiple government pages. The data was there. The usability wasn't.

What we do

• Live VIN lookups.Type in a 17-character VIN and we pass it directly to NHTSA's live API to return the list of open recalls for that specific vehicle, plus a decoded vehicle summary.
• Brand and model history pages. For every brand and model we track, we assemble the full recall campaign history in one scrollable page, with component categorization, reliability scorecards, and filtering by model year.
• Owner-complaint context. Alongside recall data, we surface NHTSA complaint counts (including crash, fire, injury, and death flags) so that a pattern forming in real-world reports is easier to notice.
• Monthly recap reports. Every month we publish a plain-language summary of every recall NHTSA logged in the preceding month, with a short editorial read on which brands and components stood out.
• Editorial explainers. On top of each brand and model page we add a human-written analysis layer that describes what the underlying numbers actually mean: the three most common recall categories, the model years affected, the model with the highest campaign count, and how to use the page responsibly.

Editorial standards

We keep the raw campaign records as NHTSA published them, minus obvious formatting cruft. When we add a written analysis layer, it's clearly separated from the raw records and is generated from the live dataset at publication time. We don't invent recalls, we don't pay for visibility, and we don't accept payment from manufacturers to suppress or re-rank specific campaigns. The full details (data sources, refresh cadence, what we calculate, and what we deliberately don't do) are on our methodology page.

What RecallScanner is not

• We are not a government agency or a branch of NHTSA.
• We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any vehicle manufacturer or dealer network.
• We do not provide legal, mechanical, or insurance advice. See our disclaimer.
• We do not store the VINs you look up, sell your data, or run remarketing against your searches.

How we're funded

RecallScanner is free for everyone and will stay that way. The site covers its operating costs (servers, the daily data pipeline, domain, monitoring) primarily through contextual advertising, which is clearly labeled and never affects which recalls we show or how we categorize them. See our disclaimer for the full advertising and sponsorship statement.

Corrections and contact

If you spot an error on any page (a missing recall, a stale status, an incorrect editorial claim), please contact us with the URL and what looks wrong. We review every correction request and update against the live NHTSA source.

For anything else, email hello@recallscanner.com or see our contact page.