3.2 Data: Car issue issues

We need to find incidents of problems related to airbags. There’s not a specific airbag registry, but there’s something close: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (part of the U.S. Department of Transportation) has a section called the Office of Defects Investigation.

The NHTSA/ODI takes complaints about car issues that might be related to safety, and if it notices a pattern in them a recall may happen.

Under the “Complaints” section of the NHTSA/ODI Database site, you can find a set of files that contain all complaints received since 1995.

• FLAT_CMPL.zip: The complaints themselves, unzips into a 1GB+ text file
• CMPL.txt: the data dictionary for the complaints file
• Import_Instructions.pdf: how to import the files into Microsoft Access (which we won’t be doing)