About
Method, sources and what happens to a VIN
Drive is a set of static pages. It has no server of its own to ask and no database; your browser puts the questions to the public sources directly, and the pages arrange the answers.
What Drive is
One desk for a car: decode its VIN, read the recall campaigns and the owner complaints for its model, look up its official fuel economy, and search a register of charging stations. The desk does the first four in one step. It is free, there is no account, and it is published by Luxury American Brands LLC.
Method
Every figure on a result panel is either the source’s own, shown as it came, or a count made in your browser from what the source returned — and the panel says which. The pages hold no sample data and no stored copy of any feed. When a source does not answer, the panel names it and shows nothing in its place.
The check digit and the model-year reading on the VIN page are computed in the page from the rule in 49 CFR 565.15. The arithmetic is tested against the regulation’s own worked example.
Sources, and when each was read
| Source | Used for | Read |
|---|---|---|
| NHTSA vPIC API vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov | Decoding a VIN. Asked live, by your browser. | Documentation read 28 September 2026 |
| NHTSA recalls and complaints APIs api.nhtsa.gov | Recall campaigns, owner complaints, and the year, make and model lists. Asked live. | 28 September 2026 |
| NHTSA, “Check for Recalls” www.nhtsa.gov/recalls | What NHTSA’s VIN lookup shows and does not show; what a recall is; who does what. | 28 September 2026 |
| NHTSA, “Report a Safety Problem” | How a complaint is filed; the hotline number. | 28 September 2026 |
| fueleconomy.gov web services www.fueleconomy.gov | EPA fuel economy and its menus. Asked live. The meaning of each field is from its documentation. | Documentation read 28 September 2026 |
| 49 CFR Part 565 ecfr.gov | The structure of a VIN, the check digit, the model-year codes. | 28 September 2026, in the text up to date as of 24 September 2026 |
| Wikipedia, “Vehicle identification number” | The trade names WMI, VDS and VIS; where the check digit is compulsory. | 28 September 2026, revision of 27 September 2026 |
| OpenStreetMap ODbL 1.0 | The charging register, held as a file on this site. | Harvested 7 September 2026 |
What happens to a VIN
A VIN identifies one vehicle, and a vehicle has an owner. Drive treats the VIN accordingly.
- Where it is sent. To NHTSA’s decoder at vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov, in the one request that decodes it, when you press Decode. Nowhere else.
- What the other sources receive. The year, the make and the model — never the VIN. That is all api.nhtsa.gov and fueleconomy.gov are asked about.
- What this site receives. Nothing. The VIN is never part of a request to drive.com.im, so it cannot appear in this site’s logs.
- The address bar. The VIN is not written into the page’s address, its path or its query.
- Storage. The VIN is held in the page’s memory while the page is open. It is not written to local storage, session storage or a cookie. The only thing Drive stores in your browser is your choice of paper or dark edition.
- Analytics. The site uses Google Analytics to count visits. When a lookup is made, the event sent says which tool was used — “vin_decode”, for example — and carries no VIN, make or model.
- Links. After a lookup you can copy a link to the model, which carries the year, make and model. A link that contains the VIN is made only when you press “Copy a link that contains this VIN”. It carries the VIN after a # sign, the part of an address that browsers do not send to a server, and when such a link is opened the page reads the VIN and removes it from the address bar at once.
Two things are outside Drive’s control: NHTSA sees the VIN and your network address when your browser asks it to decode, as it would if you used NHTSA’s own decoder; and a link containing a VIN, once you have copied it, is as private as wherever you paste it.
On the charging page, “Near me” asks your browser for a position only when pressed. The position is used in the page to sort the list. It is not sent anywhere and not stored.
Limits
- The vehicle registers are US registers. Recalls, complaints and EPA ratings outside the United States are not in them.
- Recall campaigns are listed for a model. Whether one vehicle is affected or repaired is a question for NHTSA’s VIN lookup, which Drive links to and does not copy.
- Complaints are owners’ unverified accounts, and a count of them is not a rate.
- NHTSA says requests to vPIC are subject to automated traffic rate control. A burst of lookups may be refused; the panel will say the source did not answer.
- NHTSA’s two feeds write dates differently — recalls day first, complaints month first, as read on 28 September 2026. Drive spells months out. If NHTSA changes a format, a date with a day of 12 or less could be misread until the page is corrected.
- Nothing here is legal, financial or safety advice, and nothing here is a vehicle history report.
How the charging register was made
The register was harvested from OpenStreetMap on 7 September 2026 (UTC), through the Overpass API. One query per metro area asked for every node and way tagged amenity=charging_station inside a bounding box: 12 boxes, 1,065 stations. Operator names that differed only in capitalisation were folded together, connector tags were given the names drivers use, and a station’s power was taken as the highest output tagged on any of its sockets. Access was kept as mapped: open, limited, private, or not stated. Nothing was added to any record. The data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License 1.0.
Contact
Corrections are welcome at labs@labs.llc. If a figure on a panel looks wrong, the source is the place to check it first — each panel names its own.