Overview
No API key or authentication is required. The NHTSA Vehicle Complaints API is a free, public REST API provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Setup guide
Get started
The API is publicly accessible at https://api.nhtsa.gov/complaints. For detailed documentation and available endpoints, visit the official NHTSA datasets and APIs page.
Add it to Ingest
In the Ingest UI under Connectors → NHTSA Vehicle Complaints API, no credentials are needed. Simply enable the connector.
Mind the limits
No official rate limit is published. Ingest uses a conservative request rate of 2 requests per second to avoid throttling.
Supported streams
1 endpoint are available out of the box. Each endpoint syncs into its own Iceberg table in Snowflake.
| Endpoint | Description | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| complaints_by_vehicle complaints_by_vehicle | – |
Authentication
- Auth type
- None
- Provider docs
- www.nhtsa.gov ↗
Performance & limits
- Rate limit
- varies by plan
Automatic backoff
Ingest throttles requests to the published rate limit and retries with exponential backoff on transient errors. You don't need to handle 429s, retries, or pagination yourself.