Methodology

PlainVIN turns official U.S. government vehicle records into plain-English pages. This page explains where every number comes from, what we do to it, and what we never claim.

The datasets

Every figure on a PlainVIN page names its source and the date we retrieved it. The live list, with refresh dates, is on Data sources.

Dataset	What we use it for	How we process it	Limits
NHTSA vPIC (VIN decoder)	Factory specs for a VIN: year, make, model, trim, engine, plant, safety equipment	Queried live when you decode. Fields NHTSA leaves blank are hidden by default and labelled “No data from NHTSA”.	Older VINs return few fields. Blank never means the car lacks a feature.
NHTSA recalls (flat file)	Recall campaigns, the models and years they cover, and NHTSA’s summary, consequence and remedy text	Vehicle campaigns only. We show NHTSA’s text word for word and match campaigns to our catalog by make, model and model year.	A campaign listed for a model year may not cover every car of that year.
US DOT recall completion data	The share of vehicles repaired for each campaign	Shown as reported, with the date retrieved.	Manufacturers report quarterly; new campaigns have no rate yet.
NHTSA ODI owner complaints (flat file)	Complaint counts per model year and per component; crash, fire, injury and death counts as reported	Each complaint is counted once per vehicle; a complaint that names several components counts toward each. We publish counts only, never names, addresses or VINs from complaint records.	Complaints are unverified owner reports, not findings or failure rates.
NHTSA NCAP 5-Star Safety Ratings	Overall, frontal, side and rollover stars and rollover risk	For each model year we show the tested version with the most complete rating, and say which body style it was.	Not every model or version is tested.
EPA fuel economy data	City, highway and combined mpg, annual fuel cost and CO₂ for each engine and transmission	Matched to our catalog by model name and year, strictly: when the match is unclear we leave the data out.	Lab estimates; your mileage will vary. Licence confirmation is pending.
EIA weekly retail gasoline prices	The price used in fuel-cost estimates	Regular grade, all taxes included, by region and selected states.	Weekly averages; your local price may differ.

What we never claim

• We never say whether a specific car has an open recall. We list campaigns for a model year. Only NHTSA’s VIN lookup and the manufacturer know whether a particular car was repaired, so every recall card says “Not checked against your VIN.”
• We never turn complaints into reliability scores or failure rates. NHTSA publishes no sales figures alongside complaints, so a count can’t become a rate. We use words like “most complaints filed”, never “worst” or “avoid”.
• We never invent numbers. If a dataset has no value, we show none.
• We never call a car safe or unsafe. We report NHTSA’s test results and explain how to compare them fairly.
• We never sell history reports or your data.

How complaint counts work

Owners file complaints with NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation. We count distinct complaints for each make, model and model year. A complaint can name several components, so component totals add up to more than the complaint total. Crash and fire flags and injury and death counts are taken from the complaint records as reported by owners. Owners keep filing complaints for years, so we mark the two newest model years as still collecting reports and only rank model years that are at least five years old.

Which pages we ask search engines to index

A model-year report is indexed only when it has at least 50 owner complaints, at least one more kind of data (recalls, crash tests or fuel economy), and an editorial summary that a person has reviewed. Pages that don’t meet all three are still available to visitors but carry a noindex tag and no ads.

How summaries are reviewed

The “What this means” summary at the top of a report is drafted from the page’s own data. An editor checks every number against the records, edits the wording and approves it; the reviewing desk and the date appear under the summary. Pages without a reviewed summary show only a short factual sentence generated from the data, and say so. See our editorial policy and how we use AI.

Your VIN

When you decode a VIN, we send it to NHTSA’s vPIC service and show the result. We don’t save the VIN to a database, an account or our page cache (it can appear in our host’s standard server logs, because it is part of the page address). To keep the site fast, we cache NHTSA’s answer for the first 11 characters (the part that describes the model, not the individual car) for 30 days.

Found an error?

Use the “Report a data error” link on any page or our contact form. Fixes are logged on the Corrections page.