Public data register

Method & licences.

Only official datasets that contribute to public ModelYearFacts pages appear here: six US vehicle and equipment layers plus separately labelled UK MOT statistics. This register records source-specific rights; holding another file in private storage does not make it publishable.

Rights-cleared public sources

The permissions below apply to the factual fields and transformations ModelYearFacts actually publishes. They do not extend to agency seals, logos, third-party images or unrelated material that may appear on a government website.

Public datasets used by ModelYearFacts and the permissions recorded for each source
DatasetLicenceCommercial useDerivatives
RDW model-level vehicle fleet aggregatesPrivacy-safe make/model counts, admission-year ranges and average technical characteristics; no plate or owner data.CC0 1.0YesYesYesYes
NHTSA Product Information Catalog and Vehicle Listing (vPIC)Exact make, model and model-year identifiers only.Public access; no named licenceYesFactual public API fieldsYesNormalised identity keys
NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) complaintsDeduplicated report counts, component labels and incident flags; no narratives or personal fields.U.S. Public DomainYesPublic-domain factual fieldsYesCounts and bounded aggregates
NHTSA recall campaignsOfficial campaigns matched by exact make, model and model year.U.S. federal government workYesPublic federal datasetYesDocumented formatting
NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) investigationsExact model-year action numbers, component, subject and open/close dates; long investigation summaries are omitted.U.S. federal government workYesPublic federal datasetYesCounts and bounded descriptors
CPSC public recall listingA separately labelled subset of vehicle and garage equipment notices; never joined to make, model, year or VIN.U.S. federal government workYesPublic federal datasetYesTerm-selected bounded register
FuelEconomy.gov vehicle dataEPA/DOE configurations, efficiency, emissions and standardised cost estimates.EPA Standard Open Data Licence (public domain)YesPublic-domain EPA dataYesRanges and distinct-value summaries
DVSA MOT annual test data (Great Britain)Make×model MOT pass rates, mileage and top failure groups for nameplates with at least 500 tests; optional age-band fields on the same hub.Open Government Licence v3.0YesOGL v3 factual public dataYesBounded aggregates; no per-test or per-VIN rows

Approved R2 import register

The public safety projections in this release were generated from these five approved importer objects. The object identifiers and byte counts make the source snapshot reproducible; the raw objects remain private and are not bound to the public Worker.

Approved R2/importer objects used in the public NHTSA and CPSC projections
FeedImported objectUpstream checkedRights
NHTSA ODI complaints flat file369,903,146 bytes · imported datafeeds/nhtsa/defects/2026-08-24/complaints.zipUS federal government public data
NHTSA recall campaigns, 2010 onward14,812,684 bytes · imported datafeeds/nhtsa/defects/2026-08-24/recalls-post-2010.zipUS federal government public data
NHTSA recall campaigns, before 20107,384,241 bytes · imported datafeeds/nhtsa/defects/2026-08-24/recalls-pre-2010.zipUS federal government public data
NHTSA ODI defect investigations4,292,178 bytes · imported datafeeds/nhtsa/defects/2026-08-24/investigations.zipUS federal government public data
CPSC public recall listing18,249,271 bytes · imported datafeeds/cpsc/recalls/2026-08-21/all-recalls.csvUS federal government public data

Attribution and modification notice

Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) vPIC, ODI complaints, defect investigations and recall campaigns; US Consumer Product Safety Commission recall notices; FuelEconomy.gov, administered for the US Department of Energy and US Environmental Protection Agency; Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency MOT annual test data, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. ModelYearFacts is independent and is not endorsed by those agencies or by any vehicle manufacturer.

We normalise spacing, punctuation, capitalisation and dates; intersect EPA model availability with exact vPIC identity; deduplicate ODI complaint rows by ODI number; deduplicate investigation action numbers and recall campaign numbers per exact model-year; select CPSC equipment notices with explicit public heading/product terms; and collapse FuelEconomy.gov configurations into ranges and distinct-value lists. Complaint narratives, VIN fragments, owner contact/location fields and long investigation summaries are not published. CPSC notices are never treated as vehicle fitment. These transformations and any resulting errors are ModelYearFacts’, not the source agencies’.

What the permission labels mean

The EPA licence states that EPA-produced data are public domain unless otherwise specified. The federal catalogue labels ODI complaints as US Public Domain and recalls as US government works. vPIC is different: its catalogue names no formal licence, but says its factual manufacturer-reported data may be freely used by the public. For that source, this site publishes only factual identifiers and normalized identity keys—no submitted documents, marks or expressive material.

US federal government works are generally outside domestic copyright under 17 U.S.C. § 105 ↗, but not everything hosted on a government website is necessarily a government work. USAGov’s federal-material guidance ↗ explains that boundary.

Public and private data stay separate

This table is not an inventory of everything held in private storage. Raw R2 archives, recovery artefacts, private affiliate or merchant feeds, cross-market vehicle records and contractual data do not contribute to public ModelYearFacts claims unless a separate source, identity and commercial-rights review approves them. None is made public by this page.

ModelYearFacts does not offer a downloadable public dataset. This is a source-and-methods register for the evidence shown on ordinary pages, so it intentionally carries no Dataset structured data.

Unavailable or non-participating estate sources

GBIF, Copernicus, EPC, Ofcom and OFAC are unavailable for this property and do not contribute to any ModelYearFacts route, filter, statistic or commercial link. They are unrelated or gated estate sources, not fallback inputs. Other private, contractual or review-required holdings stay unavailable unless a future site-specific identity, rights and publication review explicitly approves them.