Terms of use

What this service is

TorqueAndTally gathers vehicle information published by United States federal agencies — fuel economy figures from the EPA and Department of Energy, and owner complaint and recall records from NHTSA — and presents them together for a single vehicle.

It is an information service. It is free, it needs no account, and it is intended to give context to someone deciding whether to buy or keep a particular vehicle.

What it is not

TorqueAndTally does not tell you whether a vehicle is safe to drive, and nothing here should be read as advice to drive, not drive, buy, avoid, repair or delay repairing anything.

Owner complaints are unverified reports filed by members of the public. They are not findings against a manufacturer, not a safety rating, and not an inspection. An absence of records means the agency holds nothing under that description — it is not evidence that a vehicle is sound.

Decisions about the roadworthiness or repair of a particular vehicle need a qualified mechanic and a VIN-level check with the manufacturer or NHTSA. This site is not a substitute for either, and it cannot speak to any individual car.

Accuracy, and the limits of it

Information is requested from the agencies live and passed through with as little transformation as we can manage. We do not correct, supplement or edit their records. Where we combine categories that the agencies label inconsistently, the original labels are shown.

We make no warranty that anything here is accurate, complete or current. Federal databases contain gaps, delays and errors; ours may add to them. Where a figure is too thin to be meaningful we withhold it rather than present it, but that is a matter of judgement and judgement can be wrong.

Some explanatory text is generated by a language model from the retrieved records. It can be wrong even when the underlying records are right. Treat the records as the source and the prose as a summary of them.

Acceptable use

• Use the site for your own vehicle research, commercial or personal.
• Do not scrape it, or send automated requests at a rate that degrades it for others. The underlying agency APIs are rate-limited on their side, and heavy automated use spends that budget on everyone's behalf. The source data is public — take it from the agencies directly.
• Do not attempt to gain access to systems or data that are not offered publicly here.
• Do not present this site's output as an inspection, certification or professional opinion.

Third-party content and links

We link to external sites, including federal agencies and commercial valuation services. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices. Advertising, where shown, is served by Google and is subject to Google's policies rather than ours.

Liability

The service is provided “as is”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied. To the fullest extent permitted by law we exclude liability for any loss arising from use of, or reliance on, anything on this site — including any purchase, sale, repair or maintenance decision.

Nothing here limits any liability that cannot lawfully be limited, and some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

Changes

These terms may change as the site does. The version on this page is the one that applies. Material changes will be reflected here rather than announced individually, since we hold no way to contact you.

Privacy

What is collected, and what you can switch off, is described in the Privacy & Cookie Policy. It is written against the code rather than from a template, and it is the authoritative statement on the subject.

Contact

Not yet published. A contact address must be set inconfig.yamlunder site.contact_email before this site goes live.