Where our data comes from

1. Government records

• NHTSA vPIC. The VIN decode: year, make, model, trim, engine, drivetrain, body, plant. Authoritative, free, and effectively permanent, so we cache it for 90 days.
• NHTSA recalls, ratings and complaints. Open recall campaigns by campaign number and date, crash-test ratings, and owner complaints. Refreshed every 30 days.
• fueleconomy.gov (EPA). City, highway and combined figures, fuel type and annual fuel cost. Refreshed every 30 days.

A recall shows as open because NHTSA has no repair on file. A dealer may still have completed it, which is why we tell you to ask for the repair order rather than assume.

2. Listings, prices and odometer readings

Two licensed aggregations of dealer inventory, each doing the part it is better at:

• Marketcheck. The listing timeline: every seller we have seen advertise this VIN, back to 2015, with the price asked, the mileage shown and the dates each listing was live. Aggregated across roughly 40,000 dealer websites and the major classifieds.
• Visor. Everything about the vehicle as it stands today: the live listing and its price, the seller’s own fee breakdown, the original factory MSRP, the listing’s photographs, comparable cars for sale nearby, and local supply and sold-price statistics.

What a vehicle is worth is computed from that same set, not from a valuation model: we take comparable listings of the same year, trim and drivetrain within 100 miles, show you the whole spread, and adjust for this vehicle’s own mileage and equipment.

3. How old a record can be

This follows directly from the paragraph above, and it is the thing most worth understanding about us. A listing exists only while somebody is advertising the vehicle. A car sold privately in 2016 and driven since produces no records at all in the years between, so everything we hold on it is from 2016 and is still completely real.

That is a different shape of data from a service built on state registration and service-shop records, which keep accruing every year whether or not a car is for sale. We would rather say so than let a dated price read as a current one.

4. What we don’t hold: title and accident history

We do not license state title files or the insurance reported-claims file, so we do not sell you an accident history, a title-brand check or a verified owner count. Where a report has a row for one of those and we have not checked it, it says "not checked" rather than anything that could read as clean.

What we can show is what the seller published themselves: a clean-title or single-owner flag they put on their own listing, and a link to the vehicle history report they paid for, which is usually a CARFAX. Those are their claims on their own page. We pass them through, and we vouch for neither.

5. The written sections

The short answer, the plain-English scorecard and the negotiation line are generated from the record data by a language model, then constrained to the figures in the report. They restate and prioritise what the records say; they never introduce a fact that isn’t in the data above them.

Generated sections are cached for 7 days and regenerate when the underlying records change.

6. What we don’t do

• We don’t scrape Carfax, AutoCheck or any competitor’s report.
• We don’t buy or display personal information about previous owners.
• We don’t let a dealer edit, suppress or soften a record about their own inventory.
• We don’t present an absent record as a clean record. An empty section says we found nothing.

7. Corrections

If a figure is wrong, tell us and we’ll check it against the source within 10 business days. Where our copy is wrong we fix it and refresh your report at no cost. Where the source is wrong we pass the correction upstream and annotate the record in the meantime.