Vehicle Safety Recalls

What is a vehicle safety recall?

A vehicle safety recall is issued when a manufacturer or the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) determines that a defect in a motor vehicle creates an unreasonable risk to safety, or that the vehicle fails to meet a federal motor vehicle safety standard. Once a recall is issued, the manufacturer is required by federal law (49 U.S.C. § 30120) to repair, replace, or refund the vehicle without charge to the owner. The repair obligation lasts at least 15 years from the date the vehicle was first sold, regardless of mileage, ownership history, or warranty status.

The list below contains every recall campaign in NHTSA's official database, over 30,271 campaigns covering tens of millions of individual vehicles dating back to 1966. Each entry includes the official NHTSA campaign number (used to schedule the repair at any franchised dealer), the affected component, the defect description, the consequence of the failure, and the manufacturer's remedy. You can filter by make, model year, or keyword. To check whether a specific vehicle has an open recall, use the VIN lookup; to read every recall ever issued for a particular brand, use browse by make.

How to read a recall entry

Each recall card on this page surfaces the four pieces of information that matter most to vehicle owners:

• Component. The system or part affected by the defect, brakes, airbags, fuel system, electrical, etc. NHTSA uses a standardized component taxonomy.
• Summary. Plain-English description of the defect and what is expected to fail.
• Consequence. The actual safety risk, fire, loss of brakes, airbag rupture, sudden stalling. This is the most important field for understanding severity.
• Remedy. What the dealer will do to fix the vehicle. This tells you how long the repair will take and whether parts are likely to be available.

A small share of recalls, typically less than 3 percent, also carry severity flags such as "Park Outside" or "Do Not Drive." When a recall has one of these flags, NHTSA is recommending that owners take additional precautions until the repair is performed. Park Outside means the defect can ignite a fire even when the vehicle is parked; Do Not Drive means the failure mode is severe enough that NHTSA cannot recommend continuing to operate the vehicle. We have a deeper explainer at Understanding Recall Severity.

Where this data comes from

This page is built on NHTSA's recall flat-file database, which we re-import on the first day of every month. Each individual recall record is sourced directly from NHTSA's public files, we don't paraphrase, summarize, or alter the official descriptions. The summaries you see are the manufacturer's own filings as submitted to NHTSA, lightly reformatted for readability. For the most current status of any specific VIN, the authoritative source is nhtsa.gov/recalls; this page is most useful for browsing patterns across models and years rather than checking the status of one specific car.

Read more from our blog

Recalls are initiated either voluntarily by manufacturers or mandated by NHTSA after investigation. Once a recall is issued, manufacturers must notify all affected owners by mail and provide free repairs through authorized dealerships. There is no time limit on recall repairs, even for vehicles 20+ years old.

Common recall issues include defective airbags (Takata airbag recall affected over 67 million vehicles), brake system failures, fuel system leaks, steering problems, engine stalling, and electrical fires. The most critical recalls are labeled "Do Not Drive", meaning the vehicle is unsafe to operate at all until repaired.

To check if your specific vehicle has open recalls, use our free VIN decoder. Enter your 17-digit Vehicle Identification Number to get instant results from NHTSA's database.