Terms of use
This site has not finished being set up. The publisher name and governing jurisdiction are missing from the site's configuration, so the pages that depend on them — this one, the privacy policy and the terms of use — cannot name who is responsible for the site or whose law applies to it.
To fix it, set legal.owner and
legal.jurisdiction in app/config/config.php, then clear
the page cache. Until then these pages are incomplete, and they should not be
relied on by a reader or submitted to anyone for review.
Using this site means accepting what follows. Most of it is the ordinary furniture of a public website, and one part is not: the figures here describe what happened to other people's cars, and they are not advice about yours. That section is third from the top and is the one worth reading properly.
- Acceptance
- What the site is
- Not advice
- Accuracy
- Reuse and licence
- The API
- Acceptable use
- Names and trademarks
- Liability
- Governing law
1. Acceptance of these terms
By using AtWhatMileage — reading a page, calling the API, or reusing a figure from it — you agree to these terms and to the privacy policy. If you do not agree with them, the remedy is to stop using the site, which requires nothing of you, as there is no account to close and nothing stored in your browser to clear. These terms may be updated; the date above changes when they are, and the version published at the time of your visit is the one that applies to it.
2. What this site is
This site computes and publishes statistics derived from public records of the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — owner complaints and recall campaigns — organised by vehicle make, model and model year. It reports what owners said broke, at what odometer reading, how often relative to an estimate of how many of the vehicle exist, and how severe the consequences were. The arithmetic is set out in full on the methodology page, including the assumptions it rests on and the situations in which it publishes nothing at all.
It is an independent publication. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or acting for NHTSA, the US Department of Transportation, any vehicle manufacturer, importer, dealer, insurer, warranty provider or repair chain. NHTSA does not review, approve or endorse anything here, and the presence of a manufacturer's name on a page indicates only that the federal data mentions that manufacturer.
3. Nothing here is advice
The figures on this site are descriptive statistics about a population of reports. They are not a diagnosis, a prognosis, a safety certification, a valuation, an inspection, or a recommendation to buy, keep, sell or avoid any vehicle. Nothing on the site creates a professional relationship of any kind, and it is not a substitute for a qualified mechanic, an engineer, a pre-purchase inspection or the manufacturer's own service documentation.
A median is not a due date. If a page reports that a failure mode clusters around 95,000 miles, that is a summary of reports other owners filed. It does not mean your car will fail at 95,000 miles, that it is safe before then, or that it is doomed after. Cars are maintained differently, driven differently and built differently within a single model year.
Silence is not safety. A vehicle or a failure mode with few reports may be reliable, or may simply be rare, new, or owned by people who do not file federal complaints. Absence of complaints is absence of evidence, and this site cannot tell the two apart.
If you believe your vehicle has a safety defect, the useful actions are to have it inspected, to check for open recalls with the manufacturer or NHTSA using your VIN, and to file a complaint with NHTSA yourself. This site is not a channel to the agency and cannot escalate anything on your behalf.
4. Accuracy, and the limits of it
The site is built to be correct and is published without any warranty that it is. Three sources of error are structural rather than accidental, and it is fairer to name them than to disclaim them in the abstract.
First, the input is voluntary. Complaints are filed by owners who choose to; most failures are never reported; media attention and recall publicity both increase filings independently of anything mechanical. Every count on this site is therefore a floor, and comparisons between vehicles of very different popularity are weaker than they look. Second, odometer readings are self-reported and often rounded by the person typing them, which is why mileages here are presented at the precision the sample can support rather than to the mile. Third, this site classifies complaint narratives into named failure modes by software. That process is accurate in bulk and wrong in individual cases, and a mode with few reports may contain a misfiled one.
Figures change when the source data is re-imported and the statistics recomputed. A number you quoted last month may differ from the same page today, and that is the system working. If you need a figure to stay put, record the date you took it — every page states when the data was last rebuilt.
5. Reusing what is here
The computed figures are open. Percentiles, counts, rates, severity indices, risk scores, generation groupings and the timing curves are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. You may copy, redistribute, adapt and build on them, including commercially, provided you give credit to AtWhatMileage with a link to the page the figure came from, and do not imply that we endorse you or your use. Attribution to the page rather than to the site as a whole is asked for because it lets your reader check the number.
The underlying NHTSA records are US federal government works and are not restricted by this site. If you want the raw complaints, take them from the agency rather than from here — you will get more fields and no intermediary.
The site itself is not open. The written text, the explanatory prose on every page, the failure-mode catalogue, the page designs, the layout, the stylesheet and the software that produces all of it remain the property of the publisher and are not covered by the licence above. Reproducing the site's prose wholesale, or generating a competing site from its pages, is not permitted by the figures being open. Short quotations with attribution are fine and always will be.
6. The JSON API
The API is offered free and without registration, and its output carries the same licence and the same attribution requirement as the pages. It is rate limited to roughly 60 requests per 1 hour per caller, enforced without storing your IP address — see the privacy policy for how. Exceeding the limit returns an error rather than a ban. Do not attempt to evade the limit by rotating addresses; if you need more, ask, because there is a bulk dump and handing it over is cheaper for both sides than a crawl of the whole site.
The API may change. Fields may be added, the response shape may be versioned, and endpoints may be withdrawn with as much notice as is practical for a free service run by one publisher. Build accordingly: read the version in the response, tolerate unknown fields, and cache what you fetch.
7. Acceptable use
You may read, link to, quote and reuse this site freely within the licence above. You may not: interfere with its operation or attempt to gain access to any part of it that is not published; probe, scan or test its security; crawl it at a rate that degrades it for other readers, or ignore its robots.txt; strip attribution from figures you republish; present the figures as your own original research or as an official NHTSA publication; use the site to harass a person named in a complaint narrative; or use it in a way that breaks the law where you are.
On automated reading specifically: this site is deliberately friendly to machines. There is an API, a sitemap, and a plain-text summary for language models. Use them. Bulk scraping of the HTML is worse for you and worse for us than asking for the dump.
8. Names and trademarks
Vehicle manufacturer and model names appear here to identify the vehicles the data concerns, which is the ordinary descriptive use of a name and implies no association with or endorsement by the trademark holder. All trademarks belong to their owners. Where a name is ambiguous — a model sold under different names in different markets, or reused across generations — the site follows the naming in the federal records, which is occasionally not the naming a manufacturer would prefer.
9. Links to other sites
Pages here link to NHTSA, to Google's advertising policies where relevant, and occasionally to other public sources. Those sites are not under our control, we are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices, and a link is not an endorsement.
10. Disclaimer of warranties and limitation of liability
The site is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. No warranty is given that the site will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any figure on it is correct, current or complete.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, the publisher is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, nor for any loss of profit, revenue, data or goodwill, arising from use of the site or reliance on anything published on it — including any decision to buy, sell, keep, repair or not repair a vehicle. Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid to use the site, which is nothing.
Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you; the rest still does.
If you reuse the figures from this site in your own product, publication or service, you are responsible for how you present them and for any claim arising from that presentation, and you agree to indemnify the publisher against claims that arise from your use rather than from ours.
11. Governing law, and how disputes are handled
The governing jurisdiction has not been recorded in this site's configuration, so these terms cannot yet state whose law applies to them. That is an incomplete install rather than a legal position.
If any provision here is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. Not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it. These terms, together with the privacy policy, are the whole of the agreement between us about the site.
12. Contact
Questions about these terms, licensing beyond what the licence allows, or a legal notice should go to hello@atwhatmileage.com, with the address written out rather than linked for the reason explained on the contact page.