Free VIN check — recalls for your car

What the check tells you

• Open safety recalls — every campaign NHTSA has on file for that year, make and model, with the manufacturer's own summary, the risk, and the remedy.
• What owners report — how many complaints have been filed with NHTSA about that vehicle, and which systems they are about.
• Fuel economy — the EPA city, highway and combined figures for the engine your VIN decodes to.
• What we see in scans — the trouble codes that come up most often when a car of that make is scanned with our own apps, each linked to its page.

Where to find your VIN

The VIN is stamped or printed in several places on every car, and they all carry the same seventeen characters. The easiest one is the windscreen: stand outside the car at the driver's side lower corner and look down at the dashboard through the glass, where a small metal plate sits flush against it. The second is the driver's door jamb — open the driver's door and look at the pillar the door latches to, or at the door's own edge, for a white or silver sticker that also carries the tyre pressures and the build date.

If the car is not in front of you, the VIN is on the paperwork: the registration document, the title, the insurance certificate and usually the service book. Older cars and some commercial vehicles also carry it stamped into the engine bay — on the firewall, the strut tower or the top of the chassis rail — which is the copy a workshop checks when the other two disagree.

Type it exactly as printed. Spaces and dashes are stripped as you type, and the field is not case-sensitive, so a VIN copied out of a PDF with its formatting intact is accepted as it is.

What the seventeen characters mean

A VIN is not a serial number with extra digits in front of it. Each part of it says something specific, and the three parts a lookup can read on its own are the first three characters, the ninth and the tenth.

• Characters 1-3, the WMI — the World Manufacturer Identifier. It names the manufacturer and the country the vehicle was built in, and it is the one part of a VIN that is assigned centrally rather than by the carmaker. It is also what this page falls back on when NHTSA has no record of a VIN at all: our own table maps the WMI to a make.
• Characters 4-8, the descriptor — model, body style, engine family, restraint system. The manufacturer decides what goes here and how it is coded, so there is no universal key to it; this is the part a decode database like NHTSA's is genuinely needed for.
• Character 9, the check digit — arithmetic over the other sixteen characters. Each one carries a value, each position carries a weight, and the check digit is the remainder that makes the sum come out right. It catches a mistyped or transposed character before anything is looked up. It is mandatory in North America and often unused elsewhere, which is why a European VIN that fails it is still looked up here, with a note, rather than refused.
• Character 10, the model year — a single character on a thirty-year cycle, which is why it is a letter on most cars and a digit on others. The cycle repeats, so each character has two possible years and the plausible one wins.
• Character 11, the plant — the assembly plant the vehicle came out of, in the manufacturer's own coding.
• Characters 12-17, the serial — the individual vehicle, in build order. This is the part that makes a VIN unique, and the part a manufacturer matches against when it says whether a recall has already been carried out on your car specifically.

The letters I, O and Q never appear anywhere in a VIN, in any position. They are too easily read as 1 and 0. If a VIN you have typed contains one, it is a misreading rather than an unusual VIN, and the page says so.

A few honest limits

Does this tell me whether my car's recall work has already been done?

No. Recalls are keyed to individual VINs at the manufacturer, and this check is by year, make and model — so it tells you which campaigns cover your vehicle, not whether yours has already been repaired. Your dealer can confirm that for free, and so can NHTSA's own VIN search.

Why does my VIN only show a make and a year?

NHTSA's vehicle database is a United States database. Vehicles built for other markets often decode to make and year only, and when that happens the page says so rather than pretending to know more. The recall question is then one for the manufacturer or importer in your own country.

Is my VIN stored anywhere?

No. The VIN is never put in a web address, never written to a database, never logged and never used as a cache key. It exists for the length of one lookup and then it is gone.

Does the check cost anything, or need an account?

No. There is no sign-in and no payment. The recall, complaint and fuel-economy data all come from public United States government sources, which is also why the page names them.