Challenge 21

Is It Recalled?

Type in a car's VIN and find out in seconds whether the manufacturer has open safety recalls on it.

BeginnerComplexity:Time: 15–25 min

Your task

Let someone enter a car's VIN and tell them whether it has open safety recalls, with enough detail to take to a garage.

Your bonus task

Example use cases

A workshop that wants to check a car before it goes on the ramp, without logging into three portals.
Anyone buying a used car who would rather find out about an unfixed airbag before paying.
Any lookup where one answer has to be taken apart before the next question can be asked.

Before you start

01
Sign up for n8n Cloud or open your n8n workspace. No other account is needed.
02
Both services come from the US road safety regulator and need no key: the vPIC VIN decoder and the NHTSA recalls API. They cover cars sold in the United States, so use a US VIN to test.
03
Try it with 1HGCM82633A004352, a 2003 Honda Accord. On 9 October 2026 it returned 24 recall campaigns, most of them Takata airbag inflators.
04
For the bonus, create a Data Table called family-cars with a text column vin and one row per car, and set up ntfy.sh with a hard-to-guess topic name to receive the weekly message. No account is needed.

Nodes you'll use

What the workflow must do

01
Entering a VIN in the form shows an answer in the browser naming the year, make and model that the VIN decoded to.
02
When the car has open recalls, the answer lists each campaign number with the affected component; when it has none, it says so plainly instead of showing an empty list.
03
The VIN 1HGCM82633A004352 is recognised as a 2003 Honda Accord and reports its recall campaigns. Bonus: the same checks run weekly for every car in the Data Table and arrive as a message.

Tip

0/5

Reveal up to five tips, one at a time.

Solution

Reveal the completed workflow only when you are ready to compare it with your own.

Submit as solved

Submit when your team has a working workflow to demonstrate.