nhtsa-vehicle-safety-mcp-server

Public Hosted Server: https://nhtsa.caseyjhand.com/mcp

Overview

Vehicle safety data from NHTSA — recall campaigns, consumer complaints, NCAP crash ratings, defect investigations, and VIN decoding. Search, decode, and cross-reference across five NHTSA data sources from any MCP client. Runs as a stdio process, a local Streamable HTTP server, or the public hosted endpoint above.

Tools

Related MCP server: Vincario MCP Server

Capability reference

nhtsa_get_vehicle_safety tool

• Combines NCAP crash test ratings, recall history, and complaint summary in a single response

• Frontal crash, side crash, and rollover ratings per vehicle variant

• Recall consequence text plus the do-not-drive, park-outside, and over-the-air-update advisories

• Complaint breakdown by component with crash, fire, injury, and death counts

• Returns sectionStatus (available/partial/unavailable per section) plus warnings so a partial NHTSA outage is not mistaken for a clean record

nhtsa_search_recalls tool

• Look up by make/model/year or by specific NHTSA campaign number — the two are mutually exclusive

• Campaign lookups return every make/model the campaign covers, plus the ODI investigation that preceded it

• Optional date range filtering (ISO 8601), applied locally

• Includes do-not-drive advisories, park-outside warnings, and OTA update availability

nhtsa_search_complaints tool

• Component breakdown covers every matching complaint regardless of pagination; up to 50 complaint narratives per page (default 20), offset pagination, sorted by filing date descending

• Optional component filter matches within comma-separated component lists (e.g., "ENGINE", "AIR BAGS")

• Crash, fire, injury, and death counts on both the breakdown and each complaint

• An incident date NHTSA reported that the complaint's own filing date or model year rules out is disclosed as unreliableIncidentDate rather than served as the incident date

nhtsa_get_safety_ratings tool

• Accepts either make + model + modelYear, or a follow-up vehicleId from an earlier result

• Frontal crash, side crash (barrier + pole), and rollover ratings, plus ESC/forward-collision/lane-departure ADAS availability

• Per-record complaint, recall, and investigation counts are variant-scoped — not vehicle-level totals

• NCAP coverage starts at 1990, most complete for 2011+ model years

nhtsa_decode_vin tool

• Single VIN or batch of up to 50; partial VINs accepted using * for unknown positions

• Optional modelYear helps disambiguate pre-1980 or partial VINs

• Preserves sparse VPIC fields instead of filling missing data with placeholders

• Every result carries VPIC's own errorCode/errorText decode-quality signal, including the clean "0" case

nhtsa_search_investigations tool

• Investigation types: Preliminary Evaluations (PE), Engineering Analyses (EA), Defect Petitions (DP), Recall Queries (RQ), Audit Queries (AQ), and additional ODI codes (SQ, EQ, RP, and others)

• Free-text search across investigation IDs, subjects, and summaries, plus structured make, model, and component filters — all ANDed

• nhtsaId fetches one investigation by its exact ID, mutually exclusive with the other filters — the reverse of the recall link, closing the campaign-to-investigation round trip

• Sourced from NHTSA's ODI bulk file (FLAT_INV.zip) — the first query downloads and parses it (~10s), subsequent queries use the cached index (24h TTL, matching the file's daily refresh)

• Up to 25 investigations per page (default 20), offset pagination

nhtsa_lookup_vehicles tool

• Four operations: makes, models, vehicle_types, manufacturer — partial match supported on make/manufacturer names

• models can be filtered by year; models and vehicle_types both require make

• Up to 200 results per page (default 100), offset pagination

• manufacturer lookups stop at a 500-record ceiling and disclose truncated when more may exist — VPIC publishes no match total

Features

Built on @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core: stdio and Streamable HTTP transports, pluggable auth (none / jwt / oauth), swappable storage (in-memory, filesystem, Supabase, Cloudflare KV/R2/D1), structured logging with optional OpenTelemetry tracing.

NHTSA-specific:

• Type-safe client wrapping four NHTSA JSON APIs with retry logic and sparse-field normalization, plus a streaming parser for the ODI investigations bulk file

• Investigation index caching (24h TTL) for fast repeated queries

• No API key required — all NHTSA APIs are public

Agent-friendly output:

• Provenance: every tool echoes effectiveQuery in its enrichment block, so callers can verify exactly what was searched

• Graceful partial failure: nhtsa_get_vehicle_safety returns sectionStatus per section plus warnings, so a partial NHTSA outage isn't mistaken for a clean safety record

• Discriminated outputs: unreliableIncidentDate (complaints), VIN decode errorCode/errorText, and manufacturer-lookup truncated disclose data-quality limits rather than silently omitting or fabricating values

Getting started

Public Hosted Instance

A public instance is available at https://nhtsa.caseyjhand.com/mcp — no installation required. Point any MCP client at it via Streamable HTTP:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nhtsa-vehicle-safety-mcp-server": {
      "type": "streamable-http",
      "url": "https://nhtsa.caseyjhand.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Self-Hosted / Local

Add the following to your MCP client configuration file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nhtsa-vehicle-safety-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "bunx",
      "args": ["@cyanheads/nhtsa-vehicle-safety-mcp-server@latest"],
      "env": {
        "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE": "stdio",
        "MCP_LOG_LEVEL": "info"
      }
    }
  }
}

Or with npx (no Bun required):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nhtsa-vehicle-safety-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@cyanheads/nhtsa-vehicle-safety-mcp-server@latest"],
      "env": {
        "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE": "stdio",
        "MCP_LOG_LEVEL": "info"
      }
    }
  }
}

Or with Docker:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nhtsa-vehicle-safety-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "docker",
      "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "-e", "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=stdio", "ghcr.io/cyanheads/nhtsa-vehicle-safety-mcp-server:latest"]
    }
  }
}

For Streamable HTTP, set the transport and start the server:

MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=http MCP_HTTP_PORT=3010 bun run start:http
# Server listens at http://localhost:3010/mcp

Prerequisites

• Bun v1.4.0 or higher (or Node.js >= 24.0.0)

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/cyanheads/nhtsa-vehicle-safety-mcp-server.git

2. Navigate into the directory:

cd nhtsa-vehicle-safety-mcp-server

3. Install dependencies:

bun install

4. Configure environment (optional):

cp .env.example .env
# edit .env to override transport, auth, or storage defaults — no API key required

Configuration

No API keys required — all NHTSA APIs are public.

See .env.example for the full list of optional overrides.

Running the server

Local development

• Build and run:

  # One-time build
  bun run rebuild
  
  # Run the built server
  bun run start:stdio
  # or
  bun run start:http

• Run checks and tests:

  bun run devcheck   # Lint, format, typecheck, security
  bun run test       # Vitest test suite
  bun run lint:mcp   # Validate MCP definitions against spec

Docker

docker build -t nhtsa-vehicle-safety-mcp-server .
docker run --rm -p 3010:3010 nhtsa-vehicle-safety-mcp-server

The Dockerfile defaults to HTTP transport and logs to /var/log/nhtsa-vehicle-safety-mcp-server; it restates the stateless session mode the server already declares. OpenTelemetry peer dependencies are installed by default — build with --build-arg OTEL_ENABLED=false to omit them.

Project structure

Development guide

See CLAUDE.md for development guidelines and architectural rules. The short version:

• Handlers throw, framework catches — no try/catch in tool logic

• Use ctx.log for request-scoped logging

• One tool per file, nhtsa_ prefix for every tool name, registered in createApp()

• Validate raw NHTSA responses → normalize to domain types → return the output schema; never fabricate a field NHTSA didn't provide

Data sources

All data comes from NHTSA's public APIs and bulk files:

• Recalls API — api.nhtsa.gov/recalls

• Complaints API — api.nhtsa.gov/complaints

• Safety Ratings API — api.nhtsa.gov/SafetyRatings

• Investigations bulk file — static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/inv/FLAT_INV.zip

• VPIC API — vpic.nhtsa.dot.gov/api/vehicles

Contributing

Issues are welcome. Run checks and tests before submitting:

bun run devcheck
bun run test

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE for details.