Vehicle specs, federal recalls, and OBD-II DTC reference for AI agents via MCP.
Vehicle specs, federal recalls, and OBD-II DTC reference for AI agents via MCP. Exposed over MCP by the carvector mcp server, that capability becomes something an assistant can invoke while it works, not something you go and do afterwards.
Models hallucinate car data. They invent horsepower numbers, miss recalls filed last week, and guess at what a trouble code means. carvector-mcp gives your agent structured, sourced answers it can cite instead of a confident guess.
carvector-mcp is an open-source, thin client. It bundles no data — every call forwards to the CarVector API, authenticated with your key. What you get back:
Everything the assistant can do here goes through one of these:
search_vehicles — Matching vehicles by year / make / model, with ids + specsget_vehicle — Full specs for one vehicle — engine, drivetrain, body, image, recall countget_recalls — Federal recall campaigns for a vehicle — component, summary, consequence, remedyget_complaints — Owner-complaint signal for a vehicle — aggregate by component + the most recent complaints (Pro plan)get_tsbs — Manufacturer service-bulletin index for a vehicle — the fix the dealer already knows about (Business plan)get_investigations — Federal defect investigations for a vehicle — a leading indicator of recalls (Business plan)lookup_dtc — An OBD-II code's title, category, severity, and safety/emissions flagsYou will need one environment variable: CARVECTOR_API_KEY. The server will not start without them, which is usually why the tools fail to appear on a first run. Keep credentials in your client's env block or a secrets manager rather than in a file you might commit.
Being a remote server, there is no local install. You register the endpoint with your client, authorise it once, and the tools appear.
This sits in the knowledge and memory group, where several servers overlap in what they claim to do but differ sharply once you actually set them up. Carvector's toolset — search_vehicles, get_vehicle, get_recalls and 4 more — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by carvectorio; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.
We check each listing at SyncDev against the project's documentation before it goes live — if something here drifts out of date, it is a bug worth reporting.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| search_vehicles | Matching vehicles by year / make / model, with ids + specs |
| get_vehicle | Full specs for one vehicle — engine, drivetrain, body, image, recall count |
| get_recalls | Federal recall campaigns for a vehicle — component, summary, consequence, remedy |
| get_complaints | Owner-complaint signal for a vehicle — aggregate by component + the most recent complaints *(Pro plan)* |
| get_tsbs | Manufacturer service-bulletin index for a vehicle — the fix the dealer already knows about *(Business plan)* |
| get_investigations | Federal defect investigations for a vehicle — a leading indicator of recalls *(Business plan)* |
| lookup_dtc | An OBD-II code's title, category, severity, and safety/emissions flags |
{
"mcpServers": {
"carvector": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "carvector-mcp"],
"env": {
"CARVECTOR_API_KEY": "your-value"
}
}
}
}Add to claude_desktop_config.json, then restart Claude Desktop.
| Variable | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| CARVECTOR_API_KEY | Credential the server authenticates with. | Yes |
A knowledge graph your assistant keeps between sessions — entities, relations and observations that persist.
Kill hallucinated APIs — version-accurate, up-to-date library documentation injected straight into context.
Your workspace, on speaking terms with AI — search, read and write Notion pages and databases.
A structured scratchpad for hard problems — stepwise reasoning with revisions, branches and visible logic.
Symbol-level code navigation, refactoring and memory for coding agents — the IDE brain your assistant has been missing.
Chat with your second brain — search, read and write vault notes through the Local REST API.