Data sources & methodology
VINscan produces no data of its own. It assembles three public government datasets and shows them side by side. This page names each source, states how far its coverage goes, how current it is, and what it cannot tell you.
01 / SOURCES
Where the data comes from
Product Information Catalog and Vehicle Listing (vPIC)
U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
The U.S. government's VIN decoding service. VINscan sends the VIN to vPIC's DecodeVinValues endpoint and reports the factory specifications it returns.
- Coverage
- Complete for vehicles built for the U.S. and Canadian markets. Vehicles built for other markets usually resolve only to a manufacturer and country of origin from the VIN's WMI prefix, with no model or model year.
- Freshness
- Queried live on each lookup and cached for up to 24 hours. vPIC itself is maintained continuously by NHTSA.
- Licence
- U.S. Government public domain data.
NHTSA Safety Recall Campaigns
U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
Safety recall campaigns filed with NHTSA by manufacturers. VINscan queries the public recallsByVehicle endpoint by make, model and model year.
- Coverage
- U.S.-market recall campaigns only. Returns campaigns for a make, model and model year — not for an individual VIN — so a listed campaign may not apply to the specific vehicle looked up.
- Freshness
- Queried live on each lookup and cached for up to 6 hours. A campaign appears once the manufacturer files it with NHTSA, which can lag the manufacturer's own announcement.
- Licence
- U.S. Government public domain data.
Vehicle Recalls Database (VRDB)
Transport Canada
Canadian safety recalls filed with Transport Canada. VINscan ingests the full monthly CSV export and matches it by make, model and model year.
- Coverage
- Canadian-market recall campaigns only. Matched by make, model and model year — not by VIN range. Makes absent from the export return no data at all rather than an empty result, and VINscan reports that distinction instead of showing a false all-clear.
- Freshness
- Transport Canada publishes a full export monthly and a rolling 60-day window daily. VINscan builds its history from the full export and merges the daily window on top. The exact snapshot date in use travels with the data on every surface that shows it — read that date rather than assuming a cadence, because a recall announced after it will not appear here.
- Licence
- Open Government Licence – Canada.
02 / FRESHNESS
How current this is
- Transport Canada snapshot in use
- 2026-08-24
- Canadian recall records on file
- 21,592
- NHTSA data
- queried live on every lookup
Canadian results are only as current as the snapshot date above. A recall announced in Canada after that date will not appear until the dataset is re-ingested and redeployed. U.S. results are queried live.
Source file: https://opendatatc.tc.canada.ca/vrdb_full_monthly.csv
03 / MATCHING
How recalls are matched to a vehicle
Recalls are matched by make, model and model year — never by VIN range. Many campaigns cover only a subset of the VINs in a model year. A listed recall may therefore not apply to your vehicle, and an empty list is not proof that none does.
A VIN is first decoded by vPIC into a make, model and model year. Those three values — not the VIN — are what both recall databases are then queried with.
Some vehicles are filed under a different make than vPIC reports: Dodge-era Ram trucks, for instance, are filed by both agencies under RAM rather than DODGE. VINscan issues several queries in those cases and merges the results, deduplicated by campaign number, because missing them would present a falsely clean safety record for an entire truck generation.
An absent result is not a clean result. Three outcomes are kept distinct: recalls found, a make that Transport Canada does not publish at all, and an NHTSA query that failed. The last two are not all-clears and are labelled as such in the API.
04 / LIMITS
What this data cannot tell you
- Whether a specific recall applies to your individual VIN.
- Whether a recall repair has already been carried out on the vehicle.
- Accident history, title status, liens or odometer readings. VINscan is not a vehicle history report.
- Recalls filed outside Canada and the United States.
- Whether a vehicle is safe to drive.
05 / NEXT STEPS
What to do about a recall
Recall repairs are free at a franchised dealer in both countries. To confirm that a recall applies to your specific vehicle, or to book the work, contact your manufacturer or dealer with your full VIN, or use the official channel:
- NHTSA recall lookup (search by VIN) — U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
- Defects and recalls database — Transport Canada
06 / MACHINE ACCESS
Machine-readable access
The same data is available as JSON, with no key and no authentication, for tools and assistants. Every response carries its own provenance, the basis it was matched on, and the link to the official channel.
- https://vinscan.co/llms.txt
- https://vinscan.co/api/openapi.json
- https://vinscan.co/api/vin/{VIN}
- https://vinscan.co/api/recalls/{make}/{model}/{year}
VINscan is an independent tool, not affiliated with or speaking for Transport Canada or NHTSA. About