How much of a car check is actually free?
"Free car check" is one of the most searched things by anyone about to buy a used car, and it's a fair question; nobody wants to pay to find out a car isn't worth looking at. The honest answer is that a good chunk of the useful stuff genuinely is free. Whether a car has a valid MOT, when it expires and what the last tester wrote down is public information, and our free MOT check pulls it straight up from the reg. That alone tells you a lot: a car that's just sailed through with no advisories is a very different prospect from one that keeps failing on the same corroded brake line.
Where "free" starts to stretch the truth is on the deeper record. The full MOT history going back years, the complete list of mileage readings that exposes a clocked car, the tax history and the vehicle's registered spec all come from official data that costs money to access. Any site promising all of that for nothing is either showing you a teaser and asking for payment at the last step, or harvesting your email to sell you something. We'd rather just be straight: the quick checks are free, the full file is £5.00, and there's a sample report so you can see exactly what that buys before you decide.
One thing worth saying plainly: we don't do finance or insurance write-off checks, free or paid. If an advert makes you want to check for outstanding finance or a write-off category, you'll need a dedicated HPI-style provider for that, and you should be sceptical of anyone offering those particular checks for free, because that data isn't cheap to license. What we cover is the DVLA and MOT side of a car's life, which is the part most buyers sensibly look at first, and the part you can start checking for free right here.
If you're partway through weighing up a car, the sensible order is: run the free MOT check to sanity-test the advert, read the used-car buying checklist, then pull the full report once you're serious enough to go and view it. That way you've spent nothing ruling out the obvious duds and only £5.00 on the one you actually care about.