Every car’s public record, in one place
WhichTrim is an independent reference for U.S. cars, trucks and SUVs. It brings together what the federal government and the manufacturers publish about every vehicle — recalls, service bulletins, defect investigations, owner complaints, crash ratings, fuel-economy certifications and specifications — one page per model year from 2016 on, with every figure linked to the record it came from.
Why WhichTrim exists
WhichTrim was founded by a developer who loves data and has spent years working on the technical side of automotive manufacturers. The idea behind it is simple: the records that matter most when you buy, own or sell a car are already public, and almost nobody can use them.
NHTSA publishes every safety recall, every complaint owners file, every defect investigation it opens and every communication a manufacturer sends its dealers about a problem. The EPA publishes the fuel-economy certification for every configuration. Manufacturers publish the specifications and prices of every trim. But each of those lives in its own database, under its own names and numbers, and none of them answers the question a driver actually has: what is on file about my car?
WhichTrim was built to answer that. It puts the records for each model year side by side, explains what each kind of record means and what it obliges anyone to do, and keeps the link back to the source on every figure, so nothing here has to be taken on trust.
What you will find here
How the site is made
From the source.
Every value comes from a public record or a manufacturer document and says which one. Federal text — a recall filing, a bulletin summary, an owner’s complaint — is quoted as it was filed, never rewritten into something it did not say.
Rebuilt every night.
The site is regenerated from the current federal files every night, so a recall NHTSA publishes is on its vehicle’s page by the next morning, and no figure goes stale because somebody forgot to update it.
What we add is labeled.
Where WhichTrim adds something — a plain-English reading of a filing, a comparison, a grade, a guide — it is marked as ours and sits beside the record, never in its place. Our editorial standards say how, including where AI writing tools are used.
Open to checking.
Record pages link the data they were built from, and the coverage page says where each field comes from and where the coverage stops. The methodology shows the arithmetic behind every grade.
Independence, and how WhichTrim pays for itself
WhichTrim is not affiliated with any manufacturer, dealer, NHTSA or the EPA, and no one pays to change what a page says. The public safety record — every recall, complaint and crash rating — is free to read and always will be.
The site pays for itself in three ways: paid services for businesses that need the data delivered (the Vehicle Data API and Recall Watch); display advertising on the public reading pages, never above the data and never on the account, pricing, API documentation or company pages; and disclosed affiliate links for extended warranties, insurance and accessories. Advertisers and partners have no access to the data before it is published and no say over it, the grades or the rankings. Law firms can take one flat-fee, labelled slot per state: how that works.
Spotted something wrong? Tell us.
Corrections to the data are the messages we read first. If we misread a source, we fix it in the next build; if the source itself is wrong, we say so on the page rather than quietly overwrite a federal record.