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Shop Vehicle Catalog

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A US vehicle make/model catalog for Odoo 18 Fleet, covering light-duty autos and Class 6-8 commercial trucks, with a Year/Make/Model picker on the vehicle form.

Core Odoo ships 66 brands and zero models, and its brand list is Euro-centric — no GMC, RAM, Mercury, Plymouth, Saturn or Peterbilt. Without this module every customer vehicle is hand-typed, so spellings drift and repair history cannot be grouped by model.

What it does

  • 2,387 models across 87 makes (1981–2027), loaded as Odoo CSV data files. Each model carries its production years, so the Model dropdown can be filtered to what was actually sold in the year the advisor entered.

  • Reuses core Odoo's brands where they exist (48 of 87 makes), so those brands keep their logos. Only the 39 makes core lacks get new records.

  • fleet.vehicle.model gains year_start / year_end (indexed, they drive the picker domain), year_set (the exact years including gaps), and nhtsa_model_id. covers_year() answers gap-accurate membership.

  • fleet.vehicle gains model_year_int, a numeric mirror of the existing model_year Char, because a Char cannot be compared against Integer year bounds in a view domain.

  • Year/Make/Model form: Model Year sits above Model, and picking a year narrows the model list. A mismatch warns but never blocks — grey-market imports and re-titled vehicles legitimately fall outside the catalog.

Design notes

vehicle_type is deliberately left at 'car' on every catalog record. It is tempting to selection_add a truck value, but core fleet views gate ~15 fields behind invisible="vehicle_type != 'car'", including the odometer, transmission, seats and doors (fleet/views/fleet_vehicle_views.xml). Any new value silently hides the odometer field, which the repair workflow depends on. The car/SUV/truck classification lives in category_id (fleet.vehicle.model.category) instead, which has no behaviour attached to it anywhere in core.

The picker domain uses year_start/year_end, not year_set. Only the two integers are indexed, and a compressed set cannot be expressed as a domain. The consequence is that a model with a gap in its history (VW Golf R: 2013,2016-2020,2022-2027) still appears when you type a year inside the gap. The onchange warning is what catches that case.

Data files are updatable (no noupdate) so a regenerated catalog flows through on -u. Manual edits to a catalog record therefore revert on update, which is the right behaviour for reference data. If a model ever disappears upstream, module update tries to delete it and will raise when a fleet.vehicle still points at it (model_id is required) — handle that by hand.

Regenerating the data

The data comes from open-vehicle-db, which derives it from the NHTSA vPIC API (US government, public domain).

Upstream's curation lists excluded most of what a repair shop needs: a typo in WHITE_LIST ("volkwagen") dropped Volkswagen entirely, and every commercial truck make except Peterbilt was blacklisted. The fix lives on the commercial-makes branch of https://github.com/Avunu/open-vehicle-db, which adds VW, Genesis, Polestar, Eagle, VinFast and twelve Class 6-8 makes — 70 → 87 makes, 1,678 → 2,387 models.

To refresh:

# 1. Update the source (per-make is much faster than a full sweep)
cd /path/to/open-vehicle-db
uv run ./scripts/update_car_data.py toyota

# 2. Regenerate the Odoo data files and commit the diff
cd /path/to/fleet-addons/shop_vehicle_catalog
./tools/generate_catalog.py /path/to/open-vehicle-db

# 3. Apply
python odoo/odoo-bin -c odoo.conf -d <db> -u shop_vehicle_catalog --stop-after-init

The generator parses core Odoo's fleet_cars_data.xml for brand XML IDs rather than hardcoding them, and fails loudly on any make that resembles a core brand without matching it — there is no uniqueness constraint on brand name, so a missed alias would silently split a brand's models across two records.

Tests

python odoo/odoo-bin -c odoo.conf -d <testdb> -i shop_vehicle_catalog \
  --test-enable --test-tags /shop_vehicle_catalog --stop-after-init

Not included

  • VIN decode. NHTSA vPIC DecodeVin is free and returns make/model/year plus engine and body style from the VIN already stored in fleet.vehicle.vin_sn. For a shop that beats any static catalog for data entry accuracy, and it is the natural place engine data would enter.

  • Trims/styles. open-vehicle-db has 9,960 of them, but they carry no engine or displacement data, so they add picker friction without parts-lookup value.