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Recalls are a fact of life, but some owners don’t get their cars fixed and this can have tragic results. Unfortunately, this has been demonstrated time and time again by the Takata airbag recall, which claimed another victim in May.

That incident involved a 2003 Dodge Ram 1500, which was originally recalled in 2015 and should have been fixed long ago. However, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration noted that of the 385,686 pickups recalled roughly 84,000 haven’t been repaired despite the “grave risk of serious injury or death.”

Americans aren’t the only ones putting their life on the line as Transport Canada says there are 6.6 million “unsafe vehicles” on the road with open recalls. CTV News notes that’s roughly one out of every five vehicles registered as of 2019, despite some recalls involving the possibility of injury or death.

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Canada Has 6.6 Million “Unsafe” Vehicles On The Road

Transport Canada’s VIN lookup tool

While the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration offers an easy tool to look up recalls with your vehicle identification number (VIN), Transport Canada doesn’t. Instead, you have to visit a clunky website, navigate to “Defects and recalls of vehicles, tires and child car seats,” and then click on “Find a vehicle, tire or child car seat manufacturer.”

Once there, you have to scroll through a list to find the company that made your vehicle. It then directs you to the automaker’s VIN lookup website, although a number of brands are “not available” including Audi, Jaguar, Land Rover, Porsche, Suzuki, and Volkswagen. In these cases, you’ll have to call the automaker like it’s 1985.

Needless to say, that’s a lot of steps and some people don’t want to deal with the hassle. This can potentially have deadly results, but the government is trying to make things better as the publication noted Transport Canada wants to require automakers to have a VIN lookup tool on their website.

That would be a step in the right direction, but Transport Canada might want to take a cue from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and have a VIN lookup tool of their own. That being said, Transport Canada’s Motor Vehicle Safety Recalls Database does offer a relatively basic function where you can lookup recalls based on make, model and year.