RoadVitals

Terms of use

The terms on which RoadVitals is made available. They are short and they are meant to be read.

Last updated .

1. Using this site means accepting these terms

By using RoadVitals you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the site.

2. Information only — not advice

Everything here is published for general information. Nothing on this site is safety, engineering, mechanical, legal, financial or purchasing advice, and nothing on it should be treated as a recommendation to buy, sell, keep, drive or repair any vehicle.

We cannot assess your specific vehicle. If you believe a vehicle has a safety problem, contact a qualified mechanic, your dealer or the manufacturer, and report it to NHTSA.

3. Where the data comes from, and what that implies

The records on this site are imported from third-party government sources — principally NHTSA and the EPA/U.S. Department of Energy. We restructure and re-present them; we do not verify them, and we cannot. Data is sourced from NHTSA and the U.S. Department of Energy / EPA and is presented for information only. We are not affiliated with any government agency or vehicle manufacturer.

In particular: owner complaints are unverified reports submitted by members of the public and are not evidence that a defect exists; investigations are inquiries, not findings; and manufacturer communications are bulletins sent to dealers, not recalls. Each of those is a different thing and this site labels them separately. Data sources sets out what we take from each publisher and what its known limits are.

4. No warranty as to accuracy or completeness

The site is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the data is accurate, current, complete or free of error.

Concretely: upstream records can be wrong, delayed or withdrawn; our matching of a record to a make, model or model year can be wrong; coverage is incomplete and always will be; and an absence of records for a vehicle is not evidence that nothing has been reported about it. We also do not warrant that the site will be available or uninterrupted.

5. Recalls must be confirmed against your VIN

This is the single most important limitation on the site. A recall listed against a model year does not mean every vehicle of that year is covered, and our recall counts are counts of campaigns naming a model year, not of campaigns affecting a particular car.

Recalls apply to specific vehicles, not to every vehicle of a model year. Check your VIN with NHTSA or your manufacturer's dealer to confirm whether a recall affects your vehicle.

Check a VIN on NHTSA.gov

You must confirm recall applicability, and whether a recall repair has already been performed, with NHTSA or a manufacturer’s franchised dealer. Do not rely on this site for that answer.

6. The Vehicle Issue Index is our own metric

The Vehicle Issue Index is an informational measure we calculate ourselves from public records. It is not an official safety rating, not a reliability prediction, not a failure rate, and not a statement about any individual vehicle. It must not be presented as, or confused with, NHTSA’s 5-Star Safety Ratings, which are official U.S. government crash-test results.

The Vehicle Issue Index is our own informational metric, not an official safety rating and not a reliability prediction.

The methodology page documents how the metric is computed, the biases it cannot correct for, and the thresholds below which we publish no score at all. The formula may change; when it does, the version is bumped and scores are not comparable across versions.

7. Decisions you make using this site

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from your use of, or reliance on, this site or its data — including any decision to buy, sell, keep, drive or repair a vehicle, and including indirect, incidental or consequential loss. You use the information here at your own risk and remain responsible for verifying anything that matters against the official source, which we link on every page.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

8. Acceptable use

You may read, link to, quote and cite this site freely. You may not:

  • Scrape, crawl or bulk-download the site at a rate that degrades service for other visitors, or in a way that ignores our robots directives or any rate limit.
  • Attempt to gain unauthorised access to any part of the site, its infrastructure or its administrative areas, or probe it for vulnerabilities without asking us first.
  • Use automated tools to submit VINs or search queries in volume, or otherwise use the tools for anything other than looking up a vehicle.
  • Republish the site’s pages wholesale, or present our metric or our presentation of the data as your own work or as an official rating.
  • Use the site for anything unlawful.

If you want the underlying data in bulk, take it from the source: NHTSA and the EPA publish the same datasets as downloadable files, and data sources links to each of them. That is faster for you and kinder to our server. For research or licensing questions, write to [email protected].

9. Content and intellectual property

The underlying government records are works of the U.S. federal government and are not subject to copyright in the United States. Our own contribution — the written explanations, the design, the normalisation and matching logic, the daily history we record, and the Vehicle Issue Index itself — belongs to us. Complaint text quoted on this site is reproduced from the public NHTSA record and remains the words of the person who submitted it.

10. Links to other sites

We link to NHTSA, the EPA and other official sources so you can check the primary record. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for their content or their availability.

11. Advertising

The site may carry advertising in future. If it does, it will be labelled as advertising, and it will have no influence on the data shown — every vehicle page is generated from the same records by the same rules. See privacy for what advertising would mean for cookies and consent.

12. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms as the site changes. The updated version takes effect when it is published here, and the date at the top of this page tells you when that last happened. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the revised terms.

13. Contact

Questions about these terms: [email protected]. Corrections to a specific page: [email protected]. See contact for what each address is for.