SOURCE TRANSPARENCY

Is This A Good Car? Data Sources

Is This A Good Car? uses official National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) records and clearly identifies when a source is unavailable.

NHTSA SAFETY RECALLS

Year, make, and model results apply to a vehicle population. They do not confirm whether a specific VIN has an open recall or whether a repair has already been completed.

Visit the official NHTSA recall search

NHTSA OWNER COMPLAINTS

Owner complaints are consumer reports. Counts do not represent the percentage of vehicles affected and do not establish by themselves that a safety defect exists.

Review NHTSA datasets and APIs

NHTSA EARLY WARNING REPORTING (EWR) LIGHT VEHICLE PRODUCTION DATA

Is This A Good Car? uses official NHTSA production information only where a vehicle population can be confidently matched. Missing denominators are not estimated.

Visit official NHTSA EWR information

NHTSA MANUFACTURER COMMUNICATIONS

These official records include technical service bulletins and other communications submitted by manufacturers to NHTSA. They can document service procedures, diagnostics, campaigns, warranty programs, software information, and technical conditions. Their existence or count does not establish how frequently a condition occurs.

Review official NHTSA manufacturer communications

NHTSA DEFECT INVESTIGATIONS

NHTSA defect investigations evaluate potential motor-vehicle safety defects using complaints and other information. Investigation status reflects the agency process and is not a reliability judgment from Is This A Good Car?.

Review official NHTSA investigation data

OWNER EXPERIENCE SOURCE POLICY

CarIQ does not currently ingest third-party owner reviews into production. Owner Experience is a separate subjective-evidence layer and never treats NHTSA complaints as consumer reviews.

Every future source must be reviewed for commercial use, storage, attribution, display, summarization, retention, and content-removal rights. Only an explicitly approved source may feed a public summary; unknown and needs-review sources fail closed. The current source-policy registry contains 0 approved production sources, 5 sources requiring review, and 7 prohibited workflows.

First-party reviews are the preferred long-term source, but collection remains disabled until submission terms, privacy disclosures, consent records, storage, moderation, deletion handling, and manipulation controls are ready.

DATA FRESHNESS

Complaint and recall API results are cached for approximately 24 hours. Manufacturer communications and investigations use generated local artifacts that retain ingestion timestamps and official archive references. Production remains unavailable because the official public export could not be verified and ingested.

This site is not endorsed by NHTSA. Additional sources may be added later and will be documented here when connected.

Read the analytics methodology Browse vehicle research