Vehicle Data API — VIN Decoder, Plate Lookup & Market Value | CarsXE

# CarsXE Documentation > CarsXE is a B2B vehicle data API platform from PiWaves, LLC. Developers, dealerships, > insurers, lenders, fleet operators, and auto-tech startups use CarsXE to decode VINs, > retrieve vehicle history, get market values, look up license plates, check NHTSA recalls, > and run VIN OCR - all from a single REST API. > > Coverage: 275M+ vehicle records across 50+ countries. > Performance: ~120ms median response time, 99.9% uptime SLA, SOC 2 Type II certified. > Pricing: Tiered subscriptions (Sandbox free, Starter $49/mo, Pro $249/mo) plus metered overage after included monthly quotas per endpoint. > APIs included: vehicle specifications, international vin decoder, plate decoder, vehicle images, history reports, market value, vehicle recall, recalls by ymm, plate image recognition, vin ocr, year make model, obd codes decoder, lien & theft check. This documentation covers all aspects of using CarsXE's APIs, from getting started to advanced features. ## Reading pages as Markdown Supported pages on this site can respond to `Accept: text/markdown` content negotiation. Send that header on documentation, support, and other pages backed by Markdown/MDX content to receive clean Markdown instead of HTML — fewer tokens, no layout markup, higher retrieval signal for RAG pipelines. ```bash # Docs page as Markdown curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://carsxe.com/docs/quickstart # Docs page with Markdown backing curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://carsxe.com/docs/quickstart ``` Supported documentation and support pages also advertise a `Link: rel="alternate"` response header pointing to the direct Markdown endpoint at `/api/markdown/<path>`; routes without backing Markdown/MDX content may not have a direct Markdown representation. The complete documentation corpus is available as a single Markdown file at [https://carsxe.com/llms-full.txt](https://carsxe.com/llms-full.txt), and a machine-readable OpenAPI 3.1 specification of every public endpoin

openapi: 3.1.0 info: title: CarsXE API description: | CarsXE is a B2B vehicle data API by PiWaves, LLC. It provides vehicle specifications (VIN decoding), market values, vehicle history, recalls, license plate decoding, vehicle images, plate/VIN image recognition, Year Make Model data and OBD code decoding. ## Authentication Most requests use a CarsXE API key in the `key` query parameter, e.g. `https://api.carsxe.com/specs?key=YOUR_API_KEY&vin=...`. Supported en