CarWhere Research
CarWhere Research is the data team behind CarWhere's reliability, pricing and dealer-fee analyses. We work from two kinds of sources: public federal records — NHTSA owner complaints, safety recall campaigns and service bulletins — and verified buyer transactions collected by CarWhere. Every published figure is computed by a fixed, documented method; nothing is hand-ranked and no placement is sold.
Part of CarWhere · Datasets are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution.
What we publish
Reliability & years to avoid
NHTSA owner complaints and recall campaigns, severity-weighted and compared within each model’s own history — never a sales-unadjusted brand ranking.
Reliability by make & model →What buyers actually paid
Out-the-door price analysis from verified buyer transactions: dealer fees, add-on markups and negotiation benchmarks across all 50 states.
What people paid →Open methodology
Every verdict comes from a fixed, published algorithm over public federal data — no hand-tuned scores, no pay-for-placement.
How we rate model years →Methodology
The scoring rules behind our verdicts are published in full: how we rate model years (NHTSA complaint and recall analysis) and how CarWhere pricing data works (verified buyer transactions). The reliability dataset is downloadable as CSV.
Contact
Corrections, data questions or citation requests: [email protected]. We correct verified errors and note material updates on the affected pages.