See what the listing won't tell you.

CarVitals is a free Chrome extension that checks any used-car listing the moment you open it on CarMax, Carvana, AutoTrader, Cars.com, Edmunds, or CarGurus. It shows the model year's recall campaigns, the problems owners actually report at your mileage (with real NHTSA complaint counts), crash-test ratings, what the car cost new, and what it costs to keep. Every report links the records it's built from.

Yes. The car check is free and needs no account. Your garage, the shortlist of cars you save, comes with a free account so your saved cars stay with you. If we ever add paid features, the goal is for the core check to stay free.

CarMax, Carvana, AutoTrader, Cars.com, Edmunds, and CarGurus today. New sites ship regularly. Tell us where you shop and we'll prioritize it.

The identity layer is pure U.S. government: NHTSA's VIN database, recall campaigns, owner complaints, and NCAP crash tests, plus EPA fuel economy. Pricing and cost data come from cited industry sources (iSeeCars, RepairPal, MoneyGeek), with sources linked throughout the report.

Reports are built from public U.S. government records (NHTSA recalls, complaints, and crash tests; EPA fuel economy) plus cited industry sources, and the citations sit under each section so you can check them yourself. Where data is thin, reports say so: no invented numbers.

AI has one job here: turning hundreds of raw government complaints and reviews into readable patterns. It works from the cited records underneath and from five structured fields (make, model, year, trim, mileage), so you can always look at the same records it did.

The extension reads the listing page you're viewing, on your device, and sends only five details about the car (make, model, year, trim, mileage) to build your report. No browsing history is collected, we do not sell data, and the core check works without an account.

CarVitals is built around the car, not you: it reads the listing you're on to run the check, and the details it works from are the car's: make, model, year, trim, mileage. No sign-up is needed for the check. If you create a free account to open your garage, the only things tied to you are your sign-in details and the cars you chose to save, used to keep your garage with your account.

Honestly, barely, for now. Report pages on this site may eventually carry clearly-labeled ads, and the sidebar may show at most one clearly-labeled sponsored card, picked by us rather than served through an ad network. The core check stays free.

You don't have to take our word for it. Reports link the records they're built from: the sources sit right under each section, so you can check the ones that matter to you.