Sources, methodology and disclaimers
Where every figure on carstandings.com comes from, on what basis it was measured, why some figures are absent, and the licences the data is used under.
The publishers
US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
The US Environmental Protection Agency tests fuel economy and CO₂ emissions for every new car and truck sold in the United States, on a standard laboratory cycle manufacturers must follow. The figures on this site are EPA's combined city/highway rating, in the units EPA itself publishes them: miles per gallon (or MPGe for electric and hydrogen vehicles) and grams of CO₂ per mile.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration runs the US vehicle safety programme: it decodes Vehicle Identification Numbers, orders and tracks safety recalls, crash-tests a sample of new vehicles each year, and collects reports drivers file themselves about problems with their own car. The recall count, the crash rating and the complaint count on this site are NHTSA's own figures, printed as NHTSA received them — a complaint is an unverified report, not a confirmed defect, and carstandings.com does not investigate or corroborate one.
Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)
Natural Resources Canada publishes the fuel-consumption rating for every new vehicle sold in Canada, tested under Canada's own programme and printed in the unit Canadian buyers see on the window label: litres per 100 kilometres.
NRCan's figures are published under the Open Government Licence – Canada, which makes the following acknowledgement a condition of reuse. It appears on every Canadian page and in every API response that carries NRCan's figures, verbatim:
Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.
New York State Department of Motor Vehicles (NY DMV)
New York State's Department of Motor Vehicles publishes vehicle registration counts by make and model. carstandings.com uses New York's counts only as a cross-check on a figure another publisher already measured — confirming that two independent counts agree — and never as a figure printed on its own.
US Energy Information Administration (EIA)
The US Energy Information Administration publishes the average US retail price of regular gasoline every week. carstandings.com uses that price, alongside a US car's own EPA fuel-economy figure, to compute the sourced five-year fuel line on that car's page (see “The five-year fuel figure” below).
Statistics Canada (StatCan)
Statistics Canada publishes the average retail price of gasoline across Canada every month. carstandings.com uses that price, alongside a Canadian car's own NRCan fuel-consumption figure, to compute the sourced five-year fuel line on that car's page. Statistics Canada's reuse terms ask that any adaptation of its figures carry a sentence saying so and that Statistics Canada's endorsement is not implied; both conditions are printed beside the figure itself, on every Canadian car page that carries one.
The makers' warranty guides
Basic warranty coverage — how many years and miles or kilometres a new car is covered for — is compiled by carstandings.com from each maker's own published Warranty & Maintenance Guide for that model year, which covers every car that maker sold that year. It is not an estimate: the number is the maker's own published term, read from the maker's own document and attributed to that maker on the page.
Photographs
Where a photograph appears on a car page, it is licensed for commercial reuse and the photographer or agency is named in a credit line beside it. A car with no licensed photograph available shows no image and no placeholder standing in for one.
Reading for free
The free account, and what's open to everyone
Reading car data here needs a free account (owner ruling 2026-09-22) — the same as any publisher that measures a car and asks who's asking before handing over the number. That does not mean the numbers are hidden: every car, for everyone, signed in or not, shows its combined fuel economy, its CO₂ rating, its NHTSA overall safety rating and how many recall campaigns it has had — figures the publishers already make freely available, so asking for an account to see them would add a wall where none needs to exist.
The ten most-registered models on the road, each market and year — ranked by New York State's own registration counts — are open in full to everyone, with no account at all: every figure this site publishes, for every powertrain of that model, for as long as it stays among the ten. Canada carries the same ten nameplates the United States does.
A free account reads five different cars in full every day — any five, your choice, and opening one of them again that same day costs nothing more. The count resets at midnight UTC. Past five, a car page still shows exactly what everyone sees signed out — the figures above, plus every other figure's name, unit and publisher with the number itself held — and one reminder of what a paid plan adds. Nothing already read that day is taken back, and nothing is ever hidden with no explanation. A Data or API account has no daily limit.
This is a quota on how much you can read in a sitting, not a wall around part of the data: every figure this site publishes is free to read, in full, for a signed-in reader — the ten most-registered models need no account at all, and every other car needs one. What a paid plan adds is a higher (in practice, unlimited) daily figure and a way to get the data out — the account page's downloads, or the API — rather than figures a free account cannot see.
No overall score
Why there is no overall score
carstandings.com does not publish an overall score, a rank or a “best car” for the United States or Canada. Ranking cars against each other fairly needs nearly every factor measured for nearly every car, and for these two markets the free, resellable public sources do not reach that bar: horsepower, weight, warranty, reliability, crash rating and price are each missing for too many cars to rank on, and the sources that would fill the gap are manufacturers' own figures, which are not free to resell.
Rather than publish a score built on gaps, carstandings.com publishes every figure that a public source DOES measure, names who measured it and on what basis, states how much of the market carries it, and lets a list be ordered by any one of those figures at a time. No car on this site is called better than another — a list ordered by fuel economy makes exactly one claim, about fuel economy, and no other.
Why a figure is absent
Not published
Not published. No public source measures or publishes this quantity at all, for any car in this market — not a gap in our reading of the sources, but a figure nobody in a position to sell it has ever measured.
Different measure
Different measure. A public source measures something related but not the same quantity — for example, the horsepower of an engine alone rather than the whole car as driven. Printing one as the other would misstate what was measured, so it is withheld and named as a different quantity instead.
Not in this market's sources
Not in this market's sources. A figure another market's public sources do measure is not measured by this market's own sources — each country runs its own testing and registration programmes, and not every one of them measures everything.
Held back by our check
Held back by our check. A value existed in a publisher's data but did not pass this project's own automatic check before publication — for example, two independent sources for the same car disagreed sharply and neither could be confirmed. Rather than publish a number carstandings.com could not stand behind, it is withheld and said so, plainly, rather than printed as though it were certain.
Figures we compute from published ones
The five-year fuel figure
The five-year fuel line is the one modelled figure this site prints, and it is built from two published numbers and nothing else: the car's own fuel-economy figure (EPA in the United States, NRCan in Canada) and that market's average pump price over the period (EIA in the United States, Statistics Canada in Canada), multiplied by the market's own published annual-distance assumption. It is not a depreciation estimate, an insurance estimate or a total cost of ownership — those are not published for either market and carstandings.com does not model them. A car whose powertrain makes the calculation meaningless (a plug-in hybrid, where the split between electric and petrol driving is a choice the owner makes, not a fact about the car) carries no fuel line at all, rather than one built on a guess about how it will be driven.
Owner complaints
The owner-complaints figure is a count of reports NHTSA received about a car from its own owners, grouped by the vehicle component the complaint named. It is exactly what NHTSA published — an unverified report, not a confirmed defect — with a link to read the complaints themselves at NHTSA. On Canadian pages this figure is still NHTSA's US data, labelled as such: NHTSA does not run a Canadian complaints programme, and no other public source of comparable owner-reported complaints exists for Canada. The recall campaigns shown on a Canadian page are the same US NHTSA recall system's campaigns, for the same reason.
Licences, method and the API
Licences and acknowledgements
Every figure on this site comes from a source carstandings.com has checked against that source's own published terms before publishing anything built from it. A source whose terms do not allow the kind of reuse this site or its paid plans make is never used to produce a figure sold or shown here, whatever data it publishes.
Some sources allow reuse on the condition that they are acknowledged. Natural Resources Canada's fuel-consumption data is one: it is published under the Open Government Licence – Canada, and that licence's own acknowledgement sentence appears, verbatim, on every page and in every API response that carries a Canadian car's fuel figures:
Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.
Statistics Canada's gasoline-price data carries its own condition — that any adaptation of it says so, and that Statistics Canada's endorsement is not implied — which is printed beside the five-year fuel figure on every Canadian car page that carries one, and in the API response alongside it.
Methodology
carstandings.com publishes measured figures, each with the publisher who measured it and the basis it was measured on, rather than a single derived score. No figure on this site is estimated, modelled or interpolated except the five-year fuel line above, which says so on the same line as the figure. An absent figure always carries a stated reason, chosen from the four causes above, rather than being left blank. Every published figure is free to read for a signed-in reader — see “The free account, and what's open to everyone” above for exactly how much a free account reads each day, and which cars need no account at all.
The API
Every figure and every absence reason on this site is available programmatically, in the same shape and with the same publishers and licences described above. See /developers/ for the quickstart, the field list and the API reference, and /pricing/ for what each plan includes.