Safety authorities do not keep old versions of their own recall notices. When a remedy is reworded or a risk description is softened, the new text replaces the old one and the old one is gone. There is no public archive of it. There is no diff. There is nothing to point at.
So a claim like “the recall used to say something different” is unfalsifiable in both directions. Nobody can prove it, and nobody can disprove it.
This page fixes that, and it does not ask you to trust us.
1,485 US recall campaigns are on file here, read between 2026-09-15 and 2026-09-17.
Download the dated manifest and you hold a fingerprint of what every one of them said today. If a wording is changed later, you can prove it yourself: you will not have to take our word for what it used to say.
What the manifest is
One row per campaign. Each row carries the campaign number, the date we read it, the SHA-256 of its wording, and the byte length of each field. It is a fingerprint, not the text: small enough to keep, precise enough to prove something.
The hash is taken over the remedy, the summary and the consequence, in that order, separated by a newline and an ASCII record separator. That recipe is fixed and published so anyone can recompute it. If it ever has to change, it will be published as a second version alongside the first, never as a replacement.
Why a hash rather than the text
If we published only the text, you would still be taking our word for it: we could edit our own copy later and you would have no way of knowing. A hash published today cannot be reverse-engineered to fit wording written tomorrow.
So: download the manifest, keep the file. If a recall is reworded next month, we will show you the before and after. You will not have to believe us, because you can hash your own copy of the old wording and check it against the number you already had.
How to check one yourself
Take the wording for a single campaign from /wp-json/cmvwa/v1/wording?campaign=25V022, join the three fields in order with a newline and byte 0x1e between them, and hash the result with SHA-256. It will match the sha256 column for that campaign in the manifest you downloaded.
What this does not claim
A read date is a read date. It is the day we pulled that wording from the authority. It is not the day the authority wrote it, and it is not the day we first saw it.
Recording began on 17 August 2026. Anything reworded before then was already gone when we arrived. We cannot produce a version we never held, and we do not pretend otherwise.
The holding covers the most recently published US campaigns, not every recall ever issued. A campaign outside that set is reported as not on file. That is different from unchanged, and the two are never merged.
The rest of the record
- A million recalled cars with no repair on record: 18% of Dutch recall obligations have no repair logged against them.
- The same recall, two countries, two stories: matched across borders by the maker’s own code, months apart, and described with different severity.
- How long before anyone tells you your car is unsafe? The median gap between a maker declaring a defect and owners being told is 18 days; the worst on record is ten years.
- Was your recall quietly rewritten? The same archive, asked as a question about one car.
- The worldwide recall change register: every change we have recorded, with its citation.
- Which countries let you see recall changes: 23 markets scored.
- Corrections: every error we have made here.
Free to use, no key, no rate limit, no sign-up. Recall text is published by NHTSA. The dated manifest is ours.