Different countries answer this question in completely different ways, and most of them do not answer it at all. Here is every way we can check, and an honest note about where we cannot.
Netherlands: by registration
The Dutch authority publishes a repair status for every vehicle on the register. Type a kenteken and you get that car’s own answer: which recalls are outstanding, what the defect is, and what the fix is meant to be.
Live from the Netherlands vehicle register. Nothing you type here is stored: not the registration, not the result.
Nothing you type is stored. Not the registration, not the result, not a log line. The lookup goes straight to the Netherlands vehicle register and the answer is discarded once it reaches your screen. The only thing kept between requests is a count of how many lookups came from your connection in the last minute, keyed to a salted hash rather than your address, so this cannot be used to bulk-scrape the authority.
The Dutch record is also the reason we can say that more than a million recall obligations there have no repair logged against them.
United States: by make, model and year
NHTSA does not publish a per-vehicle status, so the American answer is per model. What we add is the part nobody else keeps: whether the wording of that recall has been rewritten since it was announced.
Every recall checker tells you whether your car is recalled. This one tells you whether the fix has been rewritten since it was announced. When an authority edits a recall, it replaces the old wording in place and the old wording is gone. We keep it. Recording began 2026-08-17.
Canada and the United Kingdom
Both publish recall records we track, but neither exposes a per-vehicle or per-registration status. Their recalls appear in the worldwide change register; there is no way to ask either authority about one specific car.
France and Poland
Both publish recall notices and we read them daily for changes. Neither publishes a lookup by vehicle. If a French or Polish notice is amended after publication, the change appears in our register: that is the only trace there is.
Everywhere else: the honest part
For most of the world there is no way to check at all. Not because the recalls do not exist, but because the authority publishes nothing a person or a machine can query. In several large markets the only public route is a manufacturer’s own website, which shows you what that manufacturer chooses to show you.
We keep a running assessment of which countries let you see anything at all: which countries let you see recall changes, covering 23 markets.
If your country is not listed above, that is the finding. It is not an oversight on our part, and we would rather say so than show you a box that pretends to work.
What we are adding next
Australia, Brazil, Germany, China and South Korea all publish something reachable, and engines for them are in progress. When a country goes live it appears here, with the same rule as everywhere else on this site: the authority’s own words, the date we read them, and a note when we cannot answer.
The rest of the record
- A million recalled cars with no repair on record
- How long before anyone tells you your car is unsafe?
- The same recall, two countries, two stories
- Proof of what a recall said today
If your car turns up in both registers, it is worth comparing how the same defect is worded: that is what the severity index measures.