HOW TO TRACE YOUR CAR'S SAFETY RECORD

(from the Wall Street Journal)
Toyota Motor Corp. this week announced it will offer free repairs to owners of more than 200,000 vehicles with potentially leaky oil hoses.
The action was labeled by some news outlets as a "recall," in the vein of the auto maker's recent recalls of some six million vehicles for sudden acceleration and other issues. But the latest action wasn't a recall. It was, in Toyota's phrase, a "limited service campaign."
What's the difference? A recall involves a safety defect, as defined by federal motor-vehicle regulations, and is done with the knowledge and approval of federal safety regulators. A limited service campaign is Toyota's phrase for a voluntary decision to fix a problem that reasonable customers could argue is the company's fault, even if the letter of the warranty says it's not.
The recent congressional hearings about Toyota's safety and quality lapses have put a spotlight on the sometimes-confusing world of automotive safety experts, including federal safety regulators, auto-industry engineers, regulatory-affairs officials and independent advocacy groups such as the Center for Auto Safety.
Safety officials and experts use words in ways that aren't necessarily easy for outsiders to translate. Ordinary consumers who want to explore the huge databases of information that safety regulators maintain will find portals online. But it takes persistence and some trial and error to assemble a complete answer to simple questions such as: Am I the only one who's experienced this problem? Is there a safety recall on my car?
Consider the "technical service bulletin." If you plug that phrase and the name of just about any car into an Internet search engine, you are likely to find that the vehicle in question is the subject of at least one notice that identifies a problem or defect, and directs dealers to fix it, often at no charge to the customer. Laymen might think of this as a recall, but technically they're wrong.
Finding Fault
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has its own glossary of terms that consumers will need to master to search its vehicle information database. The first thing for consumers to learn is the acronym ODI, which stands for Office of Defect Investigation.
ODI, which is part of the NHTSA, which in turn is part of the Department of Transportation, has its own Web site, www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov. Here, persistent consumers can drill down through a series of menus to find out if a car or truck is the target of consumer complaints, is under investigation by NHTSA or has been recalled.
The site is clunky. Say you want to see if any complaints have been lodged against your car. You can click on "Search Complaints" in the left-hand column. That page opens with a request to type a "NHTSA ODI Number" into a blank box. No, you probably don't have it. Instead, go to the menu on the right, and click on "vehicle." Then, click through the series of tabs—year, make, model and component—until you see what you want. To view all the complaints on, say, a 2008 Infiniti G35, don't select anything when you get to the "components" tab. Just hit "retrieve complaints."
Too bad people don't categorize their complaints the same way or use standard terminology. And once you have searched complaints, you'll need to back up and repeat the process of finding your car on a different page in the ODI site (click "Defect Investigations" on the left) to learn if the agency thinks it's heard enough of these gripes to have assigned an engineer to check them out.
NHTSA's Web site has drawn criticism from consumer advocates, including Consumers Union, which says NHTSA complaint information should be visible "via a single consumer-facing site, with intuitive tools that allow users to easily find information...and compare vehicle safety records."
Some consumer car-shopping and information Web sites offer easier-to-navigate tools for looking up defects and recalls.
Jeremy Anwyl, chief executive of Edmunds.com, says his analysts scrubbed NHTSA data on about a dozen different categories of complaints lodged from 2005 to 2010. Edmunds.com engineers reviewed NHTSA data "line by line," he says, cutting out duplications and applying a more consistent approach to describing and categorizing the reports. Edmunds then repackaged the data to show complaint rates for major manufacturers per 100,000 cars sold. "It's a lot of work," Mr. Anwyl says.
By Edmunds's measures, for example, Chrysler Group LLC had the highest rate of complaints per 100,000 vehicles among the six largest auto makers. Toyota ranked third in total complaints, but it had the highest rate of complaints in the category of sudden acceleration. Mr. Anwyl says Edmunds.com plans to publish its data on its Web site free.
Chrysler said in a statement that its analysis shows its safety recalls "are the lowest in the industry for the last two calendar years" when adjusted for sales volume. Toyota has said it believes it has developed "robust and durable" solutions for the complaints that led to its sudden acceleration recalls.
Some members of Congress want NHTSA to do more to make the huge quantities of information it has on safety complaints more user-friendly and accessible. One proposal pushed by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) and others: Allow consumers to get a full readout of recalls and other safety issues by plugging in the vehicle identification number of their cars.