Terms of Use

Welcome to VinCanary. These terms are the deal between you and us when you use vincanary.com. The short version: our reports are researched opinion built on cited public data — use them to shop smarter, but the car you buy is your call, and your responsibility.

What VinCanary is (and isn’t)

VinCanary publishes reliability research about used vehicles: federal complaint and recall data, manufacturer campaign records, and cited mechanic and owner testimony, synthesized into plain-English reports and verdicts.

Our content is information and opinion — not professional advice. We are not mechanics, appraisers, lawyers, or financial advisors, and no report is a substitute for a pre-purchase inspection by a qualified mechanic, a vehicle history report, or your own judgment. A “Calm” rating is not a promise that a specific vehicle is sound; a “Squawking” rating is not a promise that one is broken. Every individual car carries its own history.

About our data

We build from public sources — including data published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) — plus cited community and mechanic sources. We work hard to report it accurately, and every report states its sources and its confidence level. But:

• We don’t guarantee accuracy, completeness, or freshness. Federal databases change, campaigns get superseded, and new problems surface after we publish.
• Complaint data is owner-reported and not verified by us or by NHTSA.
• We are not affiliated with, or endorsed by, NHTSA or any automaker. Vehicle names and model designations belong to their manufacturers and are used only to identify the vehicles we research.

Your decisions are yours

You agree that any decision to buy, sell, repair, or not repair a vehicle is yours alone. To the fullest extent the law allows, VinCanary is not liable for losses or damages arising from your use of the site or reliance on its content — including the cost of a vehicle, repairs, or missed problems. The site is provided “as is,” without warranties of any kind.

Alerts and email

If you give us your email (watchlists, VIN checks, report requests), we’ll use it as described in our Privacy Policy. Alert services are best-effort monitoring of public sources — we try hard to catch new recalls, investigations, and warranty programs for the vehicles you watch, but we don’t guarantee we’ll catch everything or catch it first. Every email we send includes a way to unsubscribe.

Using our content

Our reports, verdicts, ratings, and the Canary Status system are ours. You’re welcome to read, print, share links, and quote brief excerpts with attribution and a link. You may not republish our reports wholesale, scrape the site at scale, use our content to train competing products, or present our work as your own.

Changes

We may update, correct, or remove content at any time — that’s the nature of tracking live federal data. We may also update these terms; the effective date above tells you when we last did. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated terms.

Questions

hello@vincanary.com — a human reads it.