About CarsMultiverse

What this site is

When a vehicle is recalled, the safety authority publishes a notice. It says what the fault is, what can happen if it is not fixed, and what the manufacturer will do about it. That notice is not final. It gets edited after publication: the remedy is rewritten, the description of the fault is reworded, the number of vehicles affected grows. The authority publishes one version at a time, and the version it published last month is gone.

We read those notices again and again, take a fingerprint of the exact wording each time we read one, and keep every version we have seen. When the wording moves, we publish both versions beside each other with the hour each was read. That archive is the site. Everything else here is computed from it.

Why it matters

An owner who read a recall notice in one month and acts on it several months later may be acting on wording the authority has since replaced. A remedy described as a repair can become an inspection. An instruction to stop driving can appear on a notice that did not carry one when it was first published. Nothing in the official record announces that this happened, because the official record holds only the current version.

Everyone else who republishes recall data mirrors the current version as well. We are not aware of any register, in any country, that publishes the earlier one.

What we publish

The centre of the site is the archive itself: a page for each recall we hold, from American campaigns and the Canadian recalls matched to them to British notices and European alerts, showing what the notice says today, what it said before if we have caught it moving, and the fingerprint that lets anybody confirm we are not quietly editing our own copy. Alongside it sits the running account of every rewrite we have caught, and a lookup that answers one question for one vehicle: has the fix for this recall been reworded since it was announced.

Around that sit studies. Each one is computed by a program from the archive rather than written by hand, so the figure in a sentence and the figure in the data file cannot drift apart. They cover how long manufacturers take to write to owners, how many recalled vehicles are never repaired, which components are least likely to get fixed, and how the same fault is described differently in different countries. Every study names its source, its method and the day it was read, and publishes the file it was computed from.

The data is free to take. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, with no key, no account and no rate limit, on the data page.

What we do not publish

No prices, no tax rates, no registration fees, no insurance figures, no incentive amounts and no fuel tariffs. No rankings, no best-of lists, no brand recommendations, and no reviews of vehicles, because we do not drive or test them and will not pretend otherwise. No number without the body that published it and the date we read it. No totals assembled from our own datasets and presented as though an authority had issued them.

We are not journalists and we do not report on the motor industry. We are an independent company that keeps this archive and makes it checkable by anybody who wants to check it.

Honest limits

We can only show a change we were present for. A notice that was rewritten before we began reading it shows no earlier version here, and the archive gets more useful the longer it runs rather than being complete on the day it started. Our holdings are deeper in some countries than others, because some authorities publish a full file and others answer one vehicle at a time. Where a page rests on a smaller set of records than the register it comes from, the page says so on the page rather than in a footnote.

We are not the authority and we are not a substitute for it. If you need to act on a recall, act on the notice the authority and the manufacturer give you. What we can tell you that they will not is whether that notice used to say something else.

How to check us

Every claim on this site is meant to be falsifiable by a reader who does not trust us. The methodology page sets out how the archive is read and compared. The verification page publishes a daily chain of hashes over everything we hold, so you can confirm that a record we show you today is the record we held on an earlier date. The status page is the site checking its own promises in public, including when it fails one.

Corrections

If something here is wrong we would rather hear it than leave it up. Tell us the page, the sentence, and what you believe the correct position is. Corrections are made on the page, and where the change is material we say what changed and when. The corrections page is the full log, and it is public because a record that quietly fixes itself is not a record.

Who runs this and how it is funded

CarsMultiverse is published by A.I.T. Multiverse Consulting Ltd, a company registered in Nicosia, Cyprus. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for any vehicle safety authority, manufacturer or dealer.

The site is free to read. It is paid for outside the record: advertising served by a third party and labelled as such, affiliate links that are always marked and cost you nothing extra, sponsorship of a register, and licences sold to companies. None of it changes what the archive shows, and whoever pays is named on the page on how this is paid for. Until that covers the costs, it is funded by the company that publishes it. The full position is on the disclosure page, and the standard we hold ourselves to is on the editorial policy page.

Where to start

If you own the vehicle, start with what can actually be checked where you live, then what to do once a recall applies to you. If you want to see the thing this site exists for, read one recall, filed twice, with the fix rewritten in between, and then everything else we have caught. If you are here for the data, everything is on the data page and the press hub.

You can write to us at any time.