VIN Decoder API
Normalized year, make, model, trim, body and powertrain from a VIN. Verified-store-first, with a live NHTSA vPIC fallback for everything else.
Vehicles.dev · 11 endpoints
Vehicle data API
11 HTTPS endpoints over one bearer-authenticated surface. Most of them read our own US vehicle dataset — 1,721,693 normalized dealer listings and 4,686,766 price and mileage observations across 1,719,030 distinct vehicles — while specifications, recalls and ownership costs wrap live NHTSA and EPA lookups, where those agencies are the authoritative source. Every response is JSON, every error is a problem document, and only successful responses are billed.
Where the data actually comes from
Listings, valuation, depreciation and photos come from data we crawl, normalize and model ourselves — one continuously updated US vehicle store, which VIN decode also reads first before falling back to a live NHTSA vPIC decode for VINs we have never seen. Specifications, recalls and ownership costs are a different bargain, and worth knowing before you buy: they are live reads of NHTSA vPIC, the NHTSA recalls API and EPA fuel-economy data, wrapped in our own VIN resolution, field normalization, error contract and timeout budget. Those three federal sources are free to query directly, and each endpoint page says so plainly.
- 1,721,693normalized US dealer listings across 1,719,030 distinct vehicles
- 4,686,766price and mileage observations, appended on every crawl pass
- 3.7%median absolute percentage error of the asking-price model on holdout data
- NHTSA + EPAvPIC specs, recall campaigns and fuel-economy figures, read live per request behind one auth surface
Identity & safety
Resolve a VIN into who the vehicle is, what the factory built, and what has been recalled since.
Vehicle Specs API
The 20-field NHTSA vPIC factory sheet for a VIN — seats, horsepower, displacement, GVWR class, plant country — read live on every request and never cached.
Vehicle Recall API
Every NHTSA safety campaign for a VIN's year, make and model, with component, consequence, remedy and campaign number. We do the VIN-to-vehicle resolution.
Valuation & ownership
What the vehicle is worth today, how that value decays, and what it costs to run.
Vehicle Valuation API
An ML-predicted current asking price in whole USD for a year/make/model, with the model's 3.7% median holdout error reported on every response.
Car Depreciation API
MSRP retention by model year, a smoothed age 0–12 retention curve and one fitted annual decay rate, for 223 covered make/model pairs.
Cost of Ownership API
EPA annual and five-year fuel cost, combined MPG and tailpipe CO2 for a year/make/model. Fuel only — pair it with depreciation for a real ownership total.
Total Cost of Ownership API
Five-year cost of ownership across depreciation, fuel, upkeep, tax and financing — with every component labelled by how much of it we actually measured.
Auto Loan Calculator API
Monthly payment, total interest and the per-year interest split for an auto loan — including the negative trade-in equity most calculators get backwards.
Car Sales Tax API
Purchase sales or use tax by state, including the per-state trade-in credit rule, plus title, registration and documentation fees.
Market & listings
The underlying marketplace: live listings and their imagery.
Car Listings API
Filter 1,721,693 normalized US dealer listings by make, model, year, price, mileage and state, and get the total match count alongside the page.
Car Images API
The photo gallery, advertised photo count and source listing link for a VIN — with an explicit flag for whether the gallery is complete. The lowest-priced data endpoint.
How the surface works
These 11 data operations are GET routes under /v1/vehicles/ on https://api.vehicles.dev, authenticated with a single Authorization: Bearer header. The separate vehicle history report workflow starts with an idempotent POST, then uses account-owned GET resources for status and the canonical JSON result. Failures are RFC 9457 problem documents carrying a stable code and retryable flag. It is a server-to-server API: no CORS headers are served and cookie authentication is rejected, so keys stay on your backend.
Billing is success-only on every endpoint — validation errors, rate-limit rejections and upstream failures release their reservation and cost nothing. Plans differ in throughput, in unit price, and in included calls — not in data quality. The reference pricing section carries the full matrix, and each endpoint page above works one plan comparison at a realistic monthly volume.
Agents can call the 11 synchronous endpoints as 11 tools through the vehicles-dev-mcp MCP server, and the OpenAPI 3.1 contract is served unauthenticated at https://api.vehicles.dev/openapi.json.
Provider-backed vehicle history is the separate asynchronous workflow linked above. It is account-owned, billed per completed report, and returns only the records available for the submitted VIN.