US Vehicle Safety Data is an independent data publication. We take the vehicle safety and fuel-economy records that the United States government already collects and republish them in a form that is easy to search, compare and read — one page per model-year, with the complete record in one place. We do not test vehicles, we do not estimate figures, and we do not blend datasets into invented scores. If a number appears on this site, it was computed from, or reproduced directly from, one of the two official datasets described below.
Our Datasets
NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration). Three databases, pulled through NHTSA's official public API at api.nhtsa.gov and accessed in October 2026: (1) the complaints database maintained by the Office of Defects Investigation, containing every owner complaint filed for the tracked model-years, with component, crash, fire, injury and death fields; (2) the recalls database, containing each recall campaign's official number, component, summary, consequence and remedy statements; and (3) the 5-Star Safety Ratings database, containing the frontal, side, side-pole and rollover scores for every tested variant. Where NHTSA rates several variants of a model-year, our pages show the most completely rated variant in the main table and list the others beneath it.
EPA FuelEconomy.gov. The complete vehicle dataset published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy (vehicles.csv, file dated September 29, 2026, containing 50,407 configuration records). From it we compute, for each tracked model-year, the number of rated configurations and the minimum, median and maximum combined fuel economy, and we reproduce the configuration table — engine, transmission, drive and fuel — exactly as rated. Electric vehicles are reported in MPGe, the EPA's gasoline-equivalent unit.
How Figures Are Computed
Complaint totals are NHTSA's own counts for the model-year, and component counts are computed by counting each complaint once under every component it names, so component shares can sum to slightly more than 100% on vehicles whose complaints name multiple components. Recall totals count formal campaigns, not affected vehicles. Fuel-economy medians are the median across all EPA configurations of the model-year — not a sales-weighted average, because the EPA does not publish configuration sales. Star ratings are reproduced from the tested variant named on the page.
Coverage and Updates
The launch edition covers 148 model-years from 15 manufacturers, chosen for U.S. sales volume and depth of record. The underlying NHTSA pull covered 230 model-years; model-years whose records were too thin to support a complete page were held back rather than padded out, and further model-years are added as their records mature. NHTSA and the EPA update their databases continuously, so figures here are a faithful snapshot as of October 2026 and may differ slightly from the agencies' live counts today.
Our Editorial Team
The US Vehicle Safety Data Editorial Team maintains the data pipeline, checks sample records against the agencies' own published pages before every release, and writes the guides and explanatory text. We verify figures against fueleconomy.gov vehicle pages and NHTSA's published records; where a publisher page and a dataset extract disagree, we follow the dataset and note it. Corrections are welcome through the contact page and are applied to the data layer, so a correction fixes every page the figure appears on.
Datasets: NHTSA complaints, recalls and safety ratings (api.nhtsa.gov) and EPA FuelEconomy.gov vehicles dataset, accessed October 2026.