Data sources and processing

The basis is the publicly available vehicle and type-approval data of the Federal Roads Office (FEDRO), together with the associated official registers and code tables. FEDRO publishes this material as open data.

dauto.ch is an independent service. It is neither published by FEDRO nor affiliated with it, and what is presented here is not an official statement.

The corpus spans several generations of Swiss type approval — from the early pre-1985 certificates, through the later paper and structured procedures, to today’s European certificates of conformity. Alongside these sit figures drawn from the vehicle fleet, which show how many vehicles of a configuration are actually registered.

Because the generations come from different procedures, they carry different fields. A field present in one generation may simply never have been recorded in another. A missing entry therefore does not mean the vehicle lacks that property.

We make the corpus searchable, bring related entries together into a configuration and present them in one consistent interface. Coded values are translated into plain language where an official meaning is established.

• The official raw value always stays visible — the translation sits beside it, never in place of it.
• Where no established meaning exists for a code, we show it unchanged rather than inventing a reading.
• Where a figure comes from the vehicle fleet rather than the approval document, it is marked as such.
• We do not quietly correct official values. What the source says is what appears here.

Official datasets are not free of error. They contain gaps, stale entries, duplicates and individual plainly wrong values. Some fields are undocumented at the source itself; those values are reproduced unchanged and marked as unexplained.

An entry on dauto.ch describes a vehicle type or configuration — not one particular vehicle. For a specific vehicle, its own documents are what count. See also the terms of use.

The corpus is refreshed periodically. Time passes between a change at the source and its appearance here. Where a figure is tied to a reference date, we name that date.

The source’s own terms apply to the underlying official data. If you rely on something presented by dauto.ch, please cite dauto.ch as the reference and link the specific page — the value lies in the individual record, not the home page.

If something is displayed incorrectly, write to us at [email protected]. If the error lies in the official dataset itself we cannot correct it here — but we report it to the source and flag it where we can.