The Recall Desk

Vehicle recall lookup

Is your vehicle recalled?

Check by VIN, or browse 171 makes covered in our NHTSA dataset. Severity is scored from objective criteria — see every recall’s page for the full reasoning.

Check by VIN

A 17-character VIN decodes to make / model / year via NHTSA’s public vPIC service — we then look up matching recalls in our database.

How vehicle recalls work

Every vehicle recall in our database comes from NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Each recall is assigned a campaign number — a string like 25V123000 where the first two digits are the year and the letter encodes the product type (V for vehicle, T for tires, C for child seats, E for equipment). The campaign number is the canonical identifier; if your dealer can’t find your vehicle in their service-action system, the campaign number unblocks the lookup.

Recalls are mandatory for the manufacturer to remedy at no charge to the owner, for as long as the vehicle exists. There’s no expiration. If you bought a used vehicle, any open recall against it carries over to you and the manufacturer is still on the hook for the fix. The remedy is almost always a free dealer visit for a part replacement, software update, or inspection.

The VIN decoder above uses NHTSA’s public vPIC service to translate your 17-character VIN into a specific make, model, and year, then cross-references our database for any matching open recalls. If you’d rather browse, every make with at least one recall is listed below.

Browse by make