Where this data comes from

NHTSA vPIC — vehicle specifications

The Vehicle Product Information Catalog is maintained by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Manufacturers are required to file it under 49 CFR Part 565 before selling a vehicle in the United States, which makes it the authoritative record of what a VIN encodes. Commercial VIN decoders build on the same source.

Covers: vehicles manufactured for sale in the US from 1981 onward — cars, trucks, motorcycles, buses, trailers, RVs and low-speed vehicles.

Does not cover: pre-1981 vehicles, grey imports, and vehicles built for other markets. Those will not decode here at all.

NHTSA recalls — safety campaigns

Recall campaigns are indexed by year, make and model rather than by VIN. That is a property of the source, not a shortcut on our part: NHTSA's public campaign data describes which vehicles a recall applies to, not which individual cars have been repaired.

This is why we never claim a recall is outstanding on your vehicle. We can tell you a campaign exists for the model. Only NHTSA's VIN lookup can tell you whether it has been performed on a specific car.

What we do not have

Title records, title brands (salvage, flood, lemon, rebuilt), accident history, theft records, odometer readings, lien records and ownership counts all come through the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System or from licensed commercial aggregators. Access requires approved-provider status, which we do not hold.

We would rather say that plainly than imply a completeness we cannot deliver. If those records are what you need, a paid history report is the right tool and we are not it.

Caching

Decoded specifications are cached indefinitely, because the specifications encoded in a VIN never change. Recall results are cached for 24 hours, because new campaigns are issued against existing vehicles and stale recall data would be a wrong answer rather than an old one.

What we collect

VINs you enter are sent to our server to be decoded and are stored as cache keys. They are not linked to you, and we do not ask for an email address or an account. Check digit validation on the validator page runs entirely in your browser and sends nothing at all.