Almost every question a buyer asks about a used vehicle has a free answer, a paid answer, or no answer at all, and the useful skill is knowing which. Four government services take a registration and hand back real facts at no charge. A handful of commercial databases hold the markers that decide whether a car is worth buying. And a small set of questions, mostly about people rather than vehicles, has no lawful answer from either.
The free registration number check: four lookups, in order
Start with the DVLA vehicle enquiry: tax status, SORN, MOT expiry, make, colour, year, engine size, fuel type and tax band, from the plate alone. Then the DVSA MOT history for every test result and the mileage recorded at each one. Then the vehicle recall check for outstanding safety work. Then askMID for whether the vehicle appears on the Motor Insurance Database. Between them they cost nothing, take a few minutes, and eliminate most of the cars that were never worth a viewing.
What only a paid report can tell you
Outstanding finance, salvage categories, theft markers, plate transfers, import and export records, scrapped markers, and the count of previous keepers all sit in industry databases rather than public registers. No free service reads them, and every paid provider is buying access to broadly the same feeds, which is why the interesting variable is price rather than coverage. Advertised prices across the vendors on this site differ by a wide margin for products that answer the same questions.
A van check and a car check are the same check
Light commercial vehicles sit on the same DVLA record, take the same MOT class in most cases, and carry the same finance, write-off and theft markers as a car. What changes is the commercial context: a van is far more likely to have been on a lease or a hire purchase agreement, more likely to have carried a signwritten livery that has since been removed, and more likely to have done its mileage in short, cold, heavily loaded runs. Read the same fields, then weight them differently.
The questions with no answer
Nothing reads the keeper's name or address from a plate, because that is protected personal data released only through a DVLA application with reasonable cause. Nothing returns a genuine service history, because no register holds one. Nothing tells you about accident damage that was never claimed on insurance, which is the single biggest blind spot in the whole market and the reason a physical inspection still earns its fee.
Questions people ask about check a vehicle
Is a free vehicle check enough before buying?
It is enough to reject most cars and never enough to buy one. The free lookups miss outstanding finance and write-off markers, which are the two findings that cost a private buyer the whole purchase price.
If I check plate details alone, what comes back?
Make, colour, year of manufacture, engine capacity, fuel type, tax status and expiry, SORN status, MOT expiry and the tax band, plus the full MOT test history with recorded mileages. All of that is free.
Do the paid providers read different databases?
Largely the same ones. The finance, write-off and theft data comes from a small number of industry sources, so compare on price, on what is actually included, and on whether a guarantee is attached.
Can I check a vehicle without the registration?
Only with the VIN, and only through a provider that accepts one. Without either identifier there is nothing to look up, because every record in this market is keyed to the vehicle.