About ProblemsByVin

I built this site because I got tired of watching folks get rolled at car dealerships buying vehicles with documented problems they had no way of knowing about.

My name is Mark Driver. I run a moving company in Garland, Texas, and I do most of my own truck work. Currently driving a 2017 F-250 6.2L gas, which means I've spent more Saturdays than I'd like under that thing. Before the moving business, I had years buying surplus industrial valves out of refineries and scrapyards across Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, then turning around and selling them to rebuilders. Different industry, same skill: figuring out what something's actually worth versus what somebody's asking for it.

What I noticed buying and selling used trucks for the moving fleet, and helping family members shop their own vehicles, is how much information is technically available and practically useless. NHTSA publishes every recall and every owner complaint in plain sight. Anybody can pull that data. Hardly anybody does, because it's organized like a government database — which it is — instead of organized like a tool a normal person can use.

So I built a tool. ProblemsByVin pulls every recall and every owner complaint from NHTSA, sorts it by vehicle, ranks it by severity, and pairs the raw data with commentary from people who've actually wrenched on these engines. If you're shopping a 2008 Ford F-150 and looking up its problem list, you don't just see "engine, 4 complaints." You see what specifically failed, what it costs to fix, and what a working mechanic would tell you about whether to buy or walk.

Why this matters

Used car buying is one of the few large purchases most folks make where they have almost no leverage. The dealer knows what the truck cost them at auction, knows the auction's history, has access to subscription tools for VIN history, and is selling the vehicle for as much as they can get. The buyer has whatever they Googled that morning and a feeling.

ProblemsByVin shifts a small piece of that imbalance. Free, no signup, no paywall. Every page is open. Every data point is sourced. Pull up the truck you're considering, see what's broken on those before, factor it into the offer. That's it.

What this site is

ProblemsByVin aggregates safety recall and owner-complaint data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and presents it in a format owners and buyers can actually use. We index the data by year, make, and model, group complaints into trouble-spot clusters, and surface the patterns that matter when you're deciding whether to buy a particular vehicle, fix one you already own, or extend warranty coverage.

Where the data comes from

Every recall on this site is sourced from the NHTSA recallsByVehicle public API. Every owner complaint comes from the NHTSA complaintsByVehicle API. Both are works of the U.S. federal government and are in the public domain. Our database refreshes weekly via an automated sync that pulls the latest filings.

Vehicle model lists come from NHTSA's vPIC (Vehicle Product Information Catalog) — the same dataset behind most VIN decoders. The vehicle index covers model years 2005 through 2025 across 33 manufacturers, refreshed monthly as NHTSA assigns new VIN ranges.

How we score reliability

Each vehicle gets a reliability score from 1.0 (worst) to 5.0 (best) — displayed on each page as a 0-10 gauge for familiarity. The score is a composite that weights:

• Number of active recalls (especially critical-severity campaigns)
• Volume of owner complaints relative to the segment
• Severity distribution — a vehicle with one critical issue scores worse than one with several moderate issues
• Concentration of issues by component category — many issues in one system signals a systemic flaw

Severity tags (critical, severe, moderate) are assigned by classifying the recall's NHTSA "consequence" text and component category. Our scoring rubric isn't perfect, but it's deterministic, repeatable, and grounded in the same data NHTSA uses to decide whether to open an investigation.

Where this can be wrong

We score 16,000+ vehicles with the same rubric. Some of those scores are going to be off, and the honest thing is to tell you where the model bends instead of pretending it doesn't. Here are the limits we know about:

• Small samples skew. A 2024 model-year vehicle with three complaints isn't reliable — it's just new. We flag vehicles with fewer than 10 NHTSA complaints on the page itself, but the underlying score is still calculated from a small base. Don't treat a 9.8/10 on a current-year vehicle as a reliability claim.
• NHTSA is self-reported. Owners file complaints voluntarily. Vehicles owned by older or less-technical demographics may be under-reported relative to their actual failure rate. Fleet vehicles are systematically under-reported because fleet managers fix and move on rather than file.
• Severity classification is imperfect. A "critical" tag depends on whether NHTSA's consequence text mentions crashes, fires, injuries, or deaths. Some genuinely severe failures (transmission stuck-in-gear, sudden electrical shutoff) read as moderate because the consequence text doesn't trip our keywords. We refine the classifier as we catch misses.
• Segment classification is a manual mapping. We assign each model to a segment (compact, midsize, full-size truck, etc.) using src/lib/segments.ts. Coverage is ~95% of complaint volume; the missing 5% is mostly niche or discontinued vehicles. Anything unmapped falls back to a generic comparison group, which is less useful.
• The "make multiplier" on the warranty calculator is an estimate. We use industry-typical labor-rate ratios — luxury European higher, mainstream Japanese lower — but real shop pricing varies by 30%+ region to region. The output should be read as a range, not a quoted figure.
• We don't have fleet-size data. A vehicle with 10,000 complaints might be worse than a vehicle with 1,000 complaints, or it might just have sold 10× the units. We partially correct for this with segment-relative scoring, but it's still a known gap.
• Recall completion isn't tracked at the VIN level on this site. A campaign we list as "active" may have been completed on your specific vehicle. The NHTSA VIN lookup is authoritative for individual completion status; we link to it on every recall.

When we get something specifically wrong — a recall we missed, a complaint we mis-classified, a scoring assumption that doesn't hold up — it gets logged on the corrections page with the date and what we changed. We don't silently rewrite anything.

Who writes the editorial commentary

The mechanic-voice stories on the vehicle hub pages come from a small group of contributors, including myself. Some are written under my name, others under pen names to protect contributors who still work in the dealership and shop world and don't want their employers seeing them publicly grading vehicles. The pen names you'll see on the site are Tony Marino, Frank DeSantis, and Shop Foreman. The pieces are real, written by real people, just published with names that protect their day jobs.

Each contributor has an individual page with their full bio, specialty area, and a complete list of their work on the site:

• Mark Driver — Founder. Domestic trucks, diesels, and used-truck buying strategy.
• Tony Marino — Mopar specialist. Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, Jeep, plus Ford modular V8s and Honda transmissions.
• Frank DeSantis — European brand specialist. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volkswagen.
• Shop Foreman — Lead technician on mainstream domestic and Japanese vehicles.

Every editorial story is grounded in actual NHTSA data for the vehicle being discussed. You'll see references to specific complaint counts, severity classifications, and recall campaigns. We don't fabricate numbers. We don't write about vehicles we don't know. When we say a 2008 Powerstroke 6.4 is a worse engine than the 6.0 it replaced, we're saying that because the people writing it have rebuilt both.

Manufacturer payment policy

We do not accept payment, sponsorship, advertising revenue, or in-kind compensation from vehicle manufacturers, OEM parts suppliers, or their PR firms. We have already turned down at least one such offer. We will turn down more.

The reason is simple: the moment a manufacturer pays us, our editorial coverage of their vehicles becomes suspect. We can't write honestly about a 6.0 Powerstroke if Ford is paying for one of our other pages. So we don't take the money.

Affiliate disclosures

We participate in affiliate programs for extended auto warranties and parts retailers. When you click an affiliate link and complete a quote or purchase, we may earn a commission. This does not affect our scoring, our editorial commentary, or which vehicles we cover. NHTSA is the source of truth for the data; affiliate programs are how we keep the lights on.

Editorial recommendations are independent of affiliate revenue. A vehicle that has documented reliability problems gets the same coverage whether it's one we'd send warranty traffic for or not. If we tell you a 6.4 Powerstroke is a bad engine, we're saying that even though that exact vehicle would generate warranty commissions if we steered you toward coverage on it. The editorial verdict comes first, every time.

For the full editorial standards documentation, see the editorial standards page.

What we are not

We are not affiliated with any vehicle manufacturer. We are not lawyers and nothing on this site is legal advice. We do not own or operate a repair shop. We are not a substitute for a pre-purchase inspection from a qualified mechanic.

ProblemsByVin is not a vehicle history report. We don't pull title status, accident records, mileage discrepancies, or ownership history. For that information, you need a paid VIN report from a service that pays insurance companies and DMVs for the data. Carfax and AutoCheck are the two big names. We may eventually integrate with one of those, but right now if you need that information, get it separately.

Contact

If you've got a correction, an editorial pitch, or feedback on the site, the easiest way to reach us is through the contact page. We read everything, even if we can't always respond personally. If you're a mechanic interested in contributing editorial pieces, especially on diesels or European vehicles, we're always looking for more voices.

If you spot a data issue or have feedback, the contact page has the details.