Press Room
Original UK vehicle data, free to cite
We run manufacturer service-history and DVSA MOT lookups for UK car buyers and motor traders, and we publish what the aggregate data shows. Every figure below is free to use with attribution to findservicehistory.com. The full methodology and sample size are on this page — nothing is behind a form.
Media contact
George Arnold
Founder & Vehicle Data Expert, FindServiceHistory
research@findservicehistory.com
Available for interview and comment. We can run bespoke cuts of this dataset — by manufacturer, vehicle age or fuel type — usually the same day. There is no regional breakdown: we do not store postcodes.
The figures
From 5,563 UK vehicle lookups, March–October 2026. Last regenerated 5 October 2026.
7,000+ checks run to date across our sites; this edition analyses 5,563 of them.
More original research
Each piece has its own method, sample and attribution line, and is free to cite on the same terms.
How to quote this accurately
If you cited our earlier 36.5%, please update it. The no-history figure is now 30.1% on 5,563 lookups. Most of that change is a correction, not new data: Ford's manufacturer feed has been down since May 2026 and a shorter Vauxhall outage ran from May to June, and lookups made during them were being counted as cars with no records. Measured the old way, today's sample would read 36.0%. Details are under Methodology below.
The mileage figure is a range, not a single number. We have measured it four times on successively larger samples and returned 1.4%, 1.4%, 1.2% and 1.3%. The defensible statement is "between 1 in 70 and 1 in 80". That stability across four runs is itself the finding.
It is a discrepancy, not proven fraud. A replaced instrument cluster produces the same signature, which is why we set a 1,000-mile threshold and report an anomaly. Please write "mileage discrepancy" or "odometer anomaly".
Brand coverage measures data availability, not owner diligence. A car serviced faithfully at an independent garage for ten years returns nothing on a manufacturer lookup. Please do not frame the brand table as a league table of how well owners look after their cars.
The dealer-trail figure is when the franchised record stops, not when servicing stops. Independent garages never appear in a manufacturer record. "Most cars leave the main dealer at around five" is accurate; "most cars stop being serviced at five" is not.
Attribution line
Paste-ready:
Methodology
Sample
- 5,563 used-car history checks run through FindServiceHistory.
- Lookups run between March and October 2026. Earlier editions gave the date range as August 2024 – August 2026; that was the bound of the rolling two-year filter, not when the lookups ran.
- United Kingdom only. Included where the DVLA vehicle identity was confirmed. Both delivered reports and "no charge taken" results are counted — a lookup that found nothing is a genuine data point, not a failure.
- 21,415 individual dated workshop entries and 37,641 MOT test records analysed.
What "no service history" means
Coverage is the share of lookups where the manufacturer's digital service record returned at least one logged entry. "No history" therefore means no digital record was retrievable — not that the car was never serviced. Some cars have a paper book only, and a great deal of UK servicing happens at independent garages whose records never reach the manufacturer's central system.
Why a low hit rate is not a broken data feed
Our data source contracts each manufacturer at one of three tiers, and they measure different things:
- Full — "we expect to receive data on any recorded services"
- Limited — "data in a minimal proportion of cases"
- Workshop remarks — recalls and warranty work only; services are not included
These are three dimensions, not one scale, so a brand's hit rate is a property of the population being looked up rather than a measure of its feed. Three brands returned zero across their entire sample and are not contracted to return services at all — Hyundai, MG and Suzuki, 271 cars between them. Excluding those, the headline moves from 30.1% to 26.5%. We lead with the all-brands figure because it is what a buyer actually experiences when they run a check. We do not exclude brands merely for a low hit rate: that would condition the result on the outcome.
Feed outages: Ford and Vauxhall
Earlier editions published Ford at 9.6% and said we had no supported explanation. We now do, and it means that figure was wrong. Ford's manufacturer feed stopped returning records from 1 May 2026 while our provider kept answering every other make; the provider confirmed on 23 September that the fault is at Ford's end. Each Ford lookup in that period came back looking exactly like a car with no history. Before the outage, 33.7% of Fords returned records (34 of 101 lookups — a small base).
We now screen every make for runs of empty results too long to be chance. That found a second outage nobody had reported: no Vauxhall records between 6 May and 19 June 2026, 35 lookups from 25 customers, against a Vauxhall hit rate of about 86% either side. The provider has not confirmed that one; we exclude it on the data and say so. Lookups inside both windows (484 Ford, 35 Vauxhall) are excluded from the sample entirely.
Mileage-discrepancy definition
- A vehicle is flagged when an MOT odometer reading dropped by more than 1,000 miles against an earlier test for the same vehicle, after normalising every reading to miles (the DVSA records some tests in kilometres).
- Evaluated on the 4,796 vehicles in the sample with two or more valid odometer readings.
- A conservative floor. A rollback done between MOTs, or below the 1,000-mile threshold, is invisible to this method, so the true rate is higher than reported.
An earlier correction that still applies
For three days in July 2026 our service-history data provider stopped answering queries, and 85 lookups were recorded as "no records" when no successful query had in fact been made. All 85 were re-run: 46 did have service history and are counted as such, 20 were confirmed genuinely empty, and the 19 that could not be re-verified were excluded from the sample entirely rather than guessed at.
Thresholds and reproducibility
- Brand coverage is published only where a manufacturer had 30 or more lookups (28 brands qualify). MOT rankings need 50 or more tests. Service intervals need 30 or more measurable gaps between consecutive confirmed services (13 brands). Mileage-anomaly brand cuts need 50 or more vehicles with two-plus readings.
- No personal data is used or published — the pipeline outputs counts, rates and buckets only. No vehicle, owner or registration is identifiable in any figure.
- Every figure is produced by a single automated aggregate query over anonymised records, re-runnable on demand for verification.
- This is a rolling window, so figures move between updates. Always quote a number together with its sample size and date.
Assets
Free to publish alongside any story using this data.
About FindServiceHistory
Boilerplate paragraph for the end of a piece:
FindServiceHistory is based in Bath, United Kingdom.