About CarVitals

CarVitals is a free browser extension and reference site that answers the questions a used-car listing won't: what safety recalls were issued for it, what actually breaks on it, and what will it really cost to own?

Why it exists

Buying a used car is one of the largest purchases most people make with the least information. The data needed to judge a car (recall campaigns, owner complaint patterns, crash tests, depreciation) is public. It's just scattered across government databases and forums, in formats nobody browsing a listing at 11pm is going to dig through. Sellers know this. That asymmetry is the whole game, and it's why first-time buyers get burned.

CarVitals closes that gap at the only moment it matters: while you're looking at the listing.

The rules we build by

• Sources first. Reports are built from cited records, and the citations ship with them.
• No invented numbers. Complaint data has no denominator, so we never show made-up failure percentages: frequency language plus real complaint counts, that's it.
• Honest uncertainty. When a check fails or data is missing, we say "couldn't check", never a quiet zero.
• Built around the car, not you. The check works from the car's details and needs no account. An optional free account exists for one thing: keeping the cars you save in your Garage with you.

Who runs it

CarVitals is built by one independent developer: no dealership money, no data brokers, no growth team. It's early: the extension supports CarMax today, the database grows weekly, and rough edges exist. If you find one, please say so.

Contact

[email protected]. Bug reports, data corrections, and blunt feedback all welcome. If a report got something wrong, include the page link and the correct source and it gets fixed.