Manufacturers are global. Recalls are national. The same defect, on the same vehicle, is recalled in different countries on different days, and sometimes in one country long before another. This page is the record of when that happened.
What we hold
We hold 2,053 recalls that appear in more than one national register. They are matched on the manufacturer’s own campaign code, after identical normalisation on every side. Nothing is paired on brand and date, because two recalls of the same brand in the same month are not the same recall.
Of those, 1,896 involve the United States, 291 involve the European Union, and 107 appear in all three registers at once.
America and Canada
1,817 of these crossings carry a filing date on both sides. The median gap between them is zero days, and 919 were filed on the same day, which is what you would expect from a manufacturer notifying two regulators about one production problem.
But 511 reached American owners first, and 387 reached Canadian owners first. The median head start in those 387 cases is three days. Nineteen of them are more than six months. Eight are more than a year.
The longest head starts
The twenty five widest gaps we hold, where the Canadian register carried the recall before the American one did.
| American campaign | Recalled in Canada | Recalled in America | Head start |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15V481 | 20 September 2013 | 30 July 2015 | 678 days |
| 25V273 | 28 August 2023 | 14 May 2025 | 625 days |
| 25V441 | 17 October 2023 | 27 June 2025 | 619 days |
| 22V244 | 27 August 2020 | 13 April 2022 | 594 days |
| 25V881 | 10 May 2024 | 18 December 2025 | 587 days |
| 23V472 | 6 May 2022 | 10 July 2023 | 430 days |
| 25V303 | 11 March 2024 | 9 May 2025 | 424 days |
| 25V272 | 26 February 2024 | 23 April 2025 | 422 days |
| 26V239 | 23 May 2025 | 14 April 2026 | 326 days |
| 15V194 | 2 July 2014 | 1 April 2015 | 273 days |
| 15V519 | 26 November 2014 | 14 August 2015 | 261 days |
| 14V623 | 23 January 2014 | 6 October 2014 | 256 days |
| 24V919 | 4 April 2024 | 10 December 2024 | 250 days |
| 23V408 | 21 October 2022 | 6 June 2023 | 228 days |
| 25V352 | 24 October 2024 | 28 May 2025 | 216 days |
| 22V948 | 24 May 2022 | 22 December 2022 | 212 days |
| 26V048 | 15 July 2025 | 28 January 2026 | 197 days |
| 13V231 | 21 November 2012 | 4 June 2013 | 195 days |
| 25V887 | 13 June 2025 | 18 December 2025 | 188 days |
| 14V460 | 20 February 2014 | 29 July 2014 | 159 days |
| 25V341 | 20 December 2024 | 23 May 2025 | 154 days |
| 22V751 | 3 May 2022 | 30 September 2022 | 150 days |
| 24V362 | 30 January 2024 | 23 May 2024 | 114 days |
| 23V561 | 17 April 2023 | 8 August 2023 | 113 days |
| 25V334 | 19 February 2025 | 21 May 2025 | 91 days |
The widest is 678 days. A vehicle recalled in Canada in September 2013 was not recalled in the United States until July 2015.
Europe
128 crossings carry a date on both the American and the European side. The median gap is 64 days, and Europe was first exactly once. Not once in a hundred, once in total. And in 128 pairs there is not a single case where the two registers published on the same day.
Against Canada the pattern is the same shape: 264 dated pairs, a median gap of 56 days, and Europe first three times.
Of the 291 European crossings we hold, Germany notified 200. France notified 22, the United Kingdom 19, Poland 18, Belgium 15 and Portugal 13. That is a fact about which member state files the alert, not about where the vehicles are.
Honest limits
This is not every recall that crossed a border. It is every crossing we can prove, which means every one where the manufacturer used the same campaign code in more than one register and both registers published it. A manufacturer that files under different codes in different countries is invisible to this method, and we would rather miss those than guess.
The dates are the dates the registers publish, which are filing dates rather than the day an owner received a letter. A head start in this table is a head start in the public record.
Check it yourself
The whole crossing set is published as a file, free to take under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, with no key and no account: the crosswalk in JSON and the same as CSV.
Computed from the crosswalk as read on 31 August 2026. American recall data is published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Canadian recall data is published by Transport Canada under the Open Government Licence for Canada. European alerts are published by the European Commission Safety Gate. The matching, the comparison and any error in them are ours.