Running a Vehicle History Report

A vehicle history report tells you what a VIN has been through before it reached your lot — reported accidents, title brands such as salvage or flood, odometer readings, and how many owners it has had. Running one before you commit to a car, and again before you retail it, is the cheapest protection there is.

Running a report

Go to VIN Checks

From the dashboard, open VIN Checks.

Enter the VIN

Type or paste the full 17-character VIN. Take the VIN off the car or the title rather than from a listing — a transposed digit returns a report for a different vehicle, and you will have paid for it.

Confirm the report

One report is offered: ClearVIN. The button names the price before you buy it — Get ClearVIN Report for $X.

Run it

Running a report costs credits, and the cost comes out of your prepaid balance. You can see what it costs before you run it, and you can check your balance under Settings → Billing → Credits.

Reading the report

Work through it in this order:

1. Title brands first. A salvage, rebuilt, flood or lemon brand changes what the car is worth and what you must disclose. Brands generally follow a vehicle from state to state, so an old brand from another state is still a brand.
2. Then the odometer history. Readings that go down, or a large gap followed by a suspiciously low number, are the classic rollback pattern.
3. Then accidents and damage. Severity matters more than the count.
4. Then owners and use. A former rental, fleet or taxi is not necessarily a bad car, but it is a different car from a one-owner trade-in.

A clean report is not a guarantee. It reports what was reported — an accident repaired privately and never claimed will not appear. Use it alongside an inspection, not instead of one.

Finding a report you already ran

Reports you have run stay on the VIN Checks page under Previous Reports. If you ran one on a car last month, open it from there rather than paying for it again.

Older reports do expire at the provider. When one has, the page says Report Expired or Unavailable and offers Re-order Report — which is a new purchase, at the usual price.

If a report will not run

• Check the VIN length. It must be exactly 17 characters. VINs never contain the letters I, O or Q, so if you have one of those, it is probably a 1 or a 0.
• Check that your business is verified. Reports need a verified dealer license, and the page says so and links you straight there. See Verifying Dealer License and Business Information.
• Check your credit balance. A report cannot run against an empty balance. Add credits under Settings → Billing → Credits.
• Very new or very old vehicles sometimes have thin history simply because there is not much on record yet.