Data Sources

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's official Vehicle Product Information Catalog. Decodes manufacturer-submitted specifications — year, make, model, trim, engine, safety equipment, and more — directly from the VIN. Used for every free vehicle-specification decode.

The official NHTSA recall data service. Returns open recall campaigns for the decoded year/make/model configuration — component, summary, consequence, and remedy. Included in every free VIN summary and every report.

A licensed commercial vehicle-data provider that The VIN Lookup uses internally to generate paid reports. Supplies title, salvage, and insurance history; lien and theft events; modeled market-value estimates; and detailed factory specifications beyond what NHTSA reports. This data powers the paid sections of a report — it is not resold, licensed, or made available through any API of our own.

A commercial data provider The VIN Lookup may use internally in the future to power license-plate-to-VIN lookup and vehicle ownership-cost estimates. The integration exists in our codebase but isn't live and won't be enabled — including license-plate lookup, behind its own feature flag — until credentials and a verified provider agreement are in place. No requests are made to it today.