Mercedes-Benz vs ProblemsByVin

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.

ProblemsByVin's Data Center publishes derived, CC BY 4.0-licensed datasets built from NHTSA's owner-complaint and recall record — a reliability scorecard, failure-mileage quartiles, and post-warranty failure patterns — as weekly-refreshed CSV and JSON downloads plus a machine-readable /data/catalog.json manifest. A live GET against both the docs page and the catalog endpoint returned access-control-allow-origin: *, reconfirming cors "yes"; no key was required, reconfirming auth "None" over HTTPS. The datasets are free to use, republish, and remix with attribution — free.