NHTSA vs ProblemsByVin

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.

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.