Journal

Notes on vehicle data

The rules that define a vehicle's identity, what vehicles report when asked, and what the data shows.

Topics

  • Vehicle identity4 posts
  • Coverage2 posts
  • Regulation2 posts
  • Recalls1 post

Latest: September 25, 2026

Recalls

The fix is software now, and so is the driver

Recalls · September 25, 2026

The fix is software now, and so is the driver

In 2025 about one Canadian vehicle recall in four was remedied with a software change, up from one in ten six years earlier, and a growing share of those changes arrive over the air. When the remedy is software, a vehicle's safety state lives in its installed version, not in its build. Driving automation takes that to its end point, and every regime that governs it asks the same question. Which software was driving?

12 min

Vehicle identityCoverage

The cars Canada is registering that most decoders return empty

A vehicle identification number is only as useful as the table behind it, and the table almost every decoder reads was filed with an American regulator. Canada asks for the number and not the table. Now that vehicles built in China are entering under a public quota, what a registration clerk, an underwriter or a lender gets back when they ask a decoder what one of them is.

September 24, 2026 · 6 min

RegulationVehicle identity

The vehicle now reports its own software identity

A UN amendment adopted in November 2025 requires a software identifier for every regulated function a manufacturer can update, readable at the diagnostic port. Canada is not a party to the rule and drives the vehicles it governs. What the amendment requires, how a check would actually work, and what the port answers when you ask.

September 24, 2026 · 7 min

Vehicle identityCoverage

The vehicles nobody could name now have names

Vehicles built in China are entering Canada under a quota that opened on March 1. The decoders most of the country runs on return nothing for them. Cardog now reads them from their own evidence. Here are the decodes.

September 24, 2026 · 3 min