automotive: index the collection by the part that failed

[ralyodio]

Ten feeds over data already flowing. No new source, no new credential, no new ingest.

The honest framing, because it shaped the result

There is no free car-parts catalogue with year/make/model fitment. ACES/VCdb (Auto Care Association) and TecDoc are both subscription. eBay's Browse API compatibility_filter is the only free source of real fitment anywhere — and only for motor-vehicle categories — and this deployment can't use it.

Scraping isn't the gap-filler it looks like either:

• Most retailer catalogues are displaying licensed ACES data, so scraping fitment off them redistributes someone else's licensed database — a worse exposure than a robots.txt violation.
• RockAuto's robots.txt names ClaudeBot explicitly. Autodoc, PartSouq and parts.cat.com sit behind Cloudflare or Akamai.

What is free, and was already here

NHTSA's component taxonomy, keyless and already ingested — and it goes down to the individual fastener:

SUSPENSION:FRONT:SPRINGS:LEAF SPRING ASSEMBLY:U-BOLT, LEAF SPRING TO AXLE

nhtsa-recalls has always slugified Component into tags. Nothing was reading them as a part index. Live right now: 4,914 recalls and 13,044 complaints.

So this is feeds, not an adapter: brakes · airbags and restraints · tires and wheels · electrical · fuel system · engine and powertrain · steering and suspension · structure and body · glass and wipers · equipment.

Each carries recalls and complaints together — a recall is the manufacturer admitting it, a complaint is an owner noticing first, and either alone is half the story.

A wart worth knowing

Every tag was checked against the live API before being written down, which turned this up:

slugify drops / instead of hyphenating it. A component containing one collapses into a single run-on word:

component	actual tag	what you'd guess
LATCHES/LOCKS/LINKAGES	latcheslockslinkages	latches-locks-linkages
VISIBILITY/WIPER	visibilitywiper	visibility-wiper

The hyphenated spellings match nothing — I wrote visibility-wiper first and it returned zero items. The feeds use what's actually in the data, and a test pins both so nobody corrects the spelling and silently empties two feeds.

Fixing slugify would be the real repair, but it would re-tag every adapter in the deployment and orphan the tags already written. Documented rather than changed.

Checks

• 9 new tests; 44 passing across the automotive files
• bun run lint clean
• Full suite 2008 tests, with the usual 5 Redis/Postgres integration failures this dev box can't run (no Redis installed, no local Postgres for migrations)

🤖 Generated with Claude Code