About
What this is
Is This A Lemon? is a public reference site for vehicle safety information. We publish one page per year, make, and model. Each page surfaces what the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) knows about that vehicle: open recalls, consumer complaints, defect investigations, manufacturer service bulletins, and NCAP crash-test ratings.
The data is public domain. The presentation is ours: aggregated, cross-linked, and indexed so that searching “2018 Honda Civic recalls” sends you to a single page that actually answers the question.
What it covers
- Recalls. Every active NHTSA recall campaign, the affected vehicles, the defect description, the manufacturer remedy, and any urgent advisories such as “Do not drive” or “Park outside.”
- Consumer complaints. Aggregate counts and severity tallies (crashes, fires, injuries, fatalities) for every model year, plus the components people complain about most.
- Defect investigations. Open and closed NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation actions, with subject and summary.
- NCAP star ratings. Overall, frontal, side, and rollover scores from NHTSA’s New Car Assessment Program.
What it doesn't cover
VIN lookup, user accounts, recall alerts, vehicle comparison, full-text search of manufacturer service bulletins, ads, and affiliate links are all out of scope for this version. If you need to check a specific VIN, the manufacturer remedy detail page on each recall links directly to nhtsa.gov/recalls.
Is This A Lemon? is not affiliated with NHTSA, any automaker, or any dealer.
See also
- Methodology → how we source and aggregate the data
- Privacy → what we collect (nothing, in v1)
- Terms → use of the site and its data