Build a vehicle recall lookup with CarVector and 30 lines of code

Most vehicle recall data lives on NHTSA's website behind a search interface that was built for humans clicking through pages, not developers building products. If you need recall data in your app — a shop management tool, a fleet dashboard, a consumer vehicle history page — you shouldn't be scraping a government website.

This tutorial builds a working recall lookup using the CarVector API. The user provides a year, make, and model. You get back every federal recall associated with that vehicle, including the component affected, the description, and the remedy.

We'll do it in Python first, then JavaScript. Both are framework-agnostic — no dependencies beyond the standard HTTP library. Plu...