Microproduct data guidebeginner

NHTSA Vehicle Recalls

Daily vehicle, tire, child-seat, and equipment recall records for building safety lookups, fleet monitors, and owner notification tools.

Start the guide Open official source

At a glance

Difficulty
Beginner — comfortable for a first prototype
Size
Small · ≤0.1 GB
Formats
JSON, ZIP, Text
Access
API or Download
API key
Not required
Provider
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
Updates
Daily
Data terms
NHTSA public-information terms

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

NHTSA publishes safety recalls by vehicle year, make, model, campaign, and affected component. Start with one exact year, make, and model and inspect the returned campaigns. Manufacturer naming varies, and recall records are different from consumer complaints, investigations, and general reliability evidence.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An exact model year, make, and model to query
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Read the recalls API documentation and confirm the vehicle naming used by NHTSA.
  2. 2.Request recalls for one model year, make, and model.
  3. 3.Preserve the campaign number and official remedy fields when presenting a result.
Open official source
3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://api.nhtsa.gov/recalls/recallsByVehicle",
    params={"make": "Acura", "model": "RDX", "modelYear": 2012},
    timeout=30,
)
response.raise_for_status()
recalls = pd.DataFrame(response.json()["results"])
recalls["retrieved_at_utc"] = pd.Timestamp.now(tz="UTC")
print(recalls[["NHTSACampaignNumber", "Component", "ReportReceivedDate"]])
4

Test a useful signal

Build a vehicle recall lookup

Determine which safety campaigns apply to one exact vehicle configuration.

  1. 01Query one model year, make, and model and remove duplicate campaign numbers.
  2. 02Display each affected component, campaign date, consequence, and official remedy.
  3. 03Explain how naming mismatches and the separation between recalls, complaints, and investigations limit the lookup.

Dataset details

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-11. Temporal coverage: 1949-present.

Domains

TransportationVehicle Safety

Data types

Event DataTabular

Tasks

Recall LookupSafety MonitoringAlerting

Geography

United States

Formats

JSONZIPText

Provider

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

Data terms

NHTSA public-information terms