Every recall checker answers the same question: is my car recalled? This one answers a different question. Has the fix been rewritten since it was announced?
When a safety authority changes a recall (a wider remedy, a different part, a stronger warning) it edits the notice in place. The earlier wording is not archived anywhere public. It is replaced. Unless somebody kept a copy, the change leaves no trace at all.
We keep the copy.
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.
What this actually checks
Your make, model and year go to NHTSA’s public recall service, which returns the campaigns for that vehicle. For each campaign we then look in our own wording archive. That archive re-reads the remedy, summary and consequence text of 1,445 United States campaigns on a rolling schedule and keeps every version it has seen. If a field has changed, you get both versions and the date each one was read.
What it cannot tell you
Recording began on 17 August 2026. A rewrite made before that date is not in the archive, because the earlier wording was already gone by the time we started. The tool says so instead of implying otherwise.
The archive covers the 1,445 most recently published US campaigns. A campaign outside that set is reported as not on file here yet, not as unchanged. Those are two different statements and we do not merge them.
A read date is a read date. When the tool says wording was read on a given day, that is the day we last pulled it from the authority. It is not a claim about when the authority wrote it, and not a claim about when we first saw it.
Where the rest of the record lives
- A million recalled cars with no repair on record: 18% of Dutch recall obligations have no repair logged against them.
- The same recall, two countries, two stories: matched across borders by the maker’s own code, months apart, and described with different severity.
- How long before anyone tells you your car is unsafe? The median gap between a maker declaring a defect and owners being told is 18 days; the worst on record is ten years.
- The worldwide recall change register: every change we have recorded, across markets, with the source citation for each.
- Which countries let you see recall changes: 23 markets scored on whether a revision is visible to the public at all.
- Corrections: every error we have made on this site and what we did about it.
Using this in your own work
The same answer is available as JSON at /wp-json/cmvrw/v1/check?make=ford&model=f-150&year=2024. No key and no rate limit. The recall records themselves are published by NHTSA; the dated comparison between one version and the next is ours.
Two figures here count rewrites and they are not the same measure. The wording fingerprint has moved on 95 campaigns. The earlier wording is held beside the current one for 87 of them, across 99 separate changes. Both are published: the fingerprints and the wording archive.