Data licence
Effective date: [DATE]
This licence says what you may do with data you download from carstandings.com or fetch from api.carstandings.com. It applies to the Data plan, the API plan and any other way we give you records. It sits alongside the Terms of Service.
1. Two layers of rights
Every record has two parts:
- The figures themselves — measurements and statements published by government agencies and manufacturers. They stay under their publishers' licences. Those licences travel with the data, and some of them require you to do something (section 3).
- Our compilation — the matching of figures to cars, the checking of one source against another, the basis and provenance recorded on every figure, the stated reason for every absence, and the selection and arrangement of the whole. We license this to you on the terms in section 2.
2. What you may do with our compilation
With a Data or API plan, you may:
- use the records inside your organisation for analysis, research, reporting and product development;
- show figures from the records to your own users, customers or readers, one car or a few at a time, in your own product or publication, with the attribution in section 4;
- keep copies for as long as your plan is active, and keep analyses and outputs you produced from them afterwards;
- with the API plan, fetch records programmatically within your plan's limits and cache them for up to [CONFIRM: 24 hours].
You may not:
- redistribute, publish, sell, sublicense or share the records as a dataset, in bulk, or in any form that substitutes for the Service — including uploading a downloaded file, or a substantial part of it, anywhere other people can take it;
- use the records to build or train a competing car-data product or service;
- remove or alter the publisher, basis or provenance recorded on a figure, or present a figure as measured on a basis other than its own;
- present a figure that we label as stated by a single source without corroboration as if it were confirmed;
- share your account or API key, or use one plan to serve other organisations.
Your rights under this section end when your plan ends, except that you may keep and use analyses and outputs you already produced.
3. The publishers' licences, and what they require of you
| Source | What it publishes | Licence | What you must do |
|---|---|---|---|
| U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) | Fuel economy, CO₂, test weights, certification data | U.S. government work — public domain | Nothing required; we ask that you name EPA where you show its figures. |
| National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) | Crash ratings, recalls, complaints, curb weights, VIN decoding | U.S. government work — public domain | Nothing required; we ask that you name NHTSA. |
| U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) | Fuel prices used in fuel-cost estimates | U.S. government work — public domain | Nothing required. |
| Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) | Canadian fuel consumption and CO₂ ratings | Open Government Licence – Canada | Wherever you show or use these figures, include the sentence: "Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada." |
| Statistics Canada | Canadian fuel prices used in fuel-cost estimates | Statistics Canada Open Licence | Wherever you show a Canadian fuel-cost figure, include the adaptation statement we supply with it (it begins "Adapted from Statistics Canada…"). |
| New York State Department of Motor Vehicles | Vehicle registration counts, used as the denominator of complaint rates | [CONFIRM: New York State open-data terms] | [CONFIRM: attribution wording]. |
| Vehicle manufacturers | Warranty terms, from each maker's published warranty guide | Facts compiled by carstandings | Nothing required. |
| Photographers (Wikimedia Commons and similar) | Photographs shown on car pages | CC BY or CC BY-SA, as marked | Photographs are not part of the records. If you reuse one, keep its credit and licence as shown on the page. |
The exact attribution sentences are also carried in every API response (attribution) and at the top of every bulk file, so a program can keep them without reading this page. Where we say a duty flows to you, that is the publisher's requirement, not ours, and we cannot waive it.
4. Attribution to carstandings
Where you show figures from the records, name the source as "carstandings.com, compiled from [the publishers named on the figures]" with a link to carstandings.com where a link is practical. In a table or an app, one line per page or screen is enough.
5. Accuracy
The figures are the publishers'. We check them, name their basis, and withhold figures that other sources contradict, but we do not warrant that any figure is correct, complete or current, and publishers revise their data. Records carry a source_data_as_of date; re-fetch or re-download to stay current. Nothing in the records is advice.
6. Ending, and what happens to copies
If you break this licence we may end your plan and this licence with it. When your plan ends for any reason, delete the bulk files and cached records within [CONFIRM: 30 days]; analyses and outputs you have already produced are yours to keep.
7. Contact
Questions about what a use is allowed, requests for a wider licence, or reports of misuse: [CONTACT EMAIL].