Auto Body Shop Directory vs NHTSA

Auto Body Shop Directory lists more than 81,000 collision repair and auto body shops across the United States, searchable by ZIP code, city, or coordinates. The keyless API returns JSON across five public endpoints, including city search and single-shop profile lookups. It is a free directory service with no paid tier; listings that use the data should credit AutoBodyShopNear.com.

NHTSA's vPIC (vehicle Product Information Catalog) API decodes VINs and looks up makes, models, and manufacturer/WMI data straight from the US government's own vehicle registry, with no signup required. A fresh live fetch of the vPIC operation index in this run lists 24 `/api/vehicles/*` operations and confirms none of them is a recall lookup — that's a separate NHTSA product (nhtsa.gov/recalls), not part of this API, correcting a prior run's summary. A live GET and OPTIONS preflight against vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov/api/vehicles/getallmakes both returned access-control-allow-origin: *, reconfirming cors "yes"; auth "None" and https were reconfirmed on the same calls. Responses are available in both JSON and XML via a format query parameter (XML is the live-confirmed default) — free, unlimited US government open data.