Kelley Blue Book vs Mercedes-Benz

Kelley Blue Book's Cox Automotive-run API program (IDWS, Advertising Data, Instant Cash Offer, and Batch VIN) provides vehicle valuation, pricing, and configuration data behind an approval-gated API key, per developer.kbb.com's own access instructions. Its legacy Swagger doc-viewer content pages (/content/data/*.html) now 404 into the site's SPA shell — orphaned — but the surrounding portal, the key-request process, and Cox Automotive's successor developer platforms (developer.coxautoinc.com, coxautoinc.mashery.com) all remain live over HTTPS, confirming https true and that the program has moved rather than gone dead; cors could not be re-probed live since no public endpoint or key is available. Access requires Cox Automotive approval with no public self-serve signup — paid.

Mercedes-Benz's connected-vehicle API platform exposes telematics data, remote vehicle commands, a car configurator, and dealer-locator lookups behind an OAuth2 client-credentials/authorization-code flow — its own docs describe exchanging a Base64-encoded Client ID/Secret for a bearer token, correcting the stored auth from "API Key" to "OAuth". A live unauthenticated GET against the real api.mercedes-benz.com gateway returned no Access-Control-Allow-Origin header on any endpoint tested, reconfirming cors "no" — consistent with Mercedes-Benz's own documentation that the API doesn't support direct browser calls; https was reconfirmed. The platform offers a free sandbox/BYOCAR tier for testing against simulated and real vehicles, plus paid production tiers per API product — freemium.