How to Trace Your Car's Safety Record
By JOSEPH B. WHITE

Toyota Motor Corp. this week announced it will offer free repairs to owners of more than 200,000 vehicles with potentially leaky oil hoses.

The action was labeled by some news outlets as a "recall," in the vein of the auto maker's recent recalls of some six million vehicles for sudden acceleration and other issues. But the latest action wasn't a recall. It was, in Toyota's phrase, a "limited service campaign."

What's the difference? A recall involves a safety defect, as defined by federal motor-vehicle regulations, and is done with the knowledge and approval of federal safety regulators. A limited service campaign is Toyota's phrase for a voluntary decision to fix a problem that reasonable customers could argue is the company's fault, even if the letter of the warranty says it's not.

The recent congressional hearings about Toyota's safety and quality lapses have put a spotlight on the sometimes-confusing world of automotive safety experts, including federal safety regulators, auto-industry engineers, regulatory-affairs officials and independent advocacy groups such as the Center for Auto Safety.

Safety officials and experts use words in ways that aren't necessarily easy for outsiders to translate. Ordinary consumers who want to explore the huge databases of information that safety regulators maintain will find portals online. But it takes persistence and some trial and error to assemble a complete answer to simple questions such as: Am I the only one who's experienced this problem? Is there a safety recall on my car?

Consider the "technical service bulletin." If you plug that phrase and the name of just about any car into an Internet search engine, you are likely to find that the vehicle in question is the subject of at least one notice that identifies a problem or defect, and directs dealers to fix it, often at no charge to the customer. Laymen might think of this as a recall, but technically they're wrong.
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