Before you pay anyone for a vehicle history report, check whether your government already gives you the same data for nothing. In much of Europe it does. In Germany it does not — and that asymmetry is the single most useful thing to understand before buying a used car here.
Here is the honest map, country by country.
The free official services, and what each one actually shows
United Kingdom — GOV.UK MOT history. The most open service in Europe. Enter a registration number, get every MOT test, the exact odometer reading recorded at each one, advisories and failures. No account, no owner permission. If you are buying a UK car, run this first, always.
Netherlands — RDW. Enter the licence plate and get registration data, inspection (APK) history and a logical/illogical odometer judgement. Open to anyone, and the underlying data is published as open data.
Poland — historiapojazdu.gov.pl (CEPiK). Free and official, covering registration, technical inspections and recorded mileage readings. You need the plate, the VIN and the date of first registration — which means you need the documents in front of you, not just a listing.
France — HistoVec. Run by the Ministry of the Interior and genuinely comprehensive: ownership history, administrative status, recorded damage. The catch that trips buyers up is procedural, not technical — the current owner has to generate the report and share the link. A seller who refuses is telling you something.
Italy — Portale dell’Automobilista. Free by plate: insurance cover status, technical-revision dates and odometer readings recorded from 2018 onward. Ownership details require a paid PRA visura from ACI.
Belgium — Car-Pass. Not a lookup so much as a legal obligation: the seller must hand over a Car-Pass certificate at every sale, showing certified mileage readings. Free to you, and refusing to provide one is illegal.
Sweden — Car.info. Denmark — TjekBil. Both give free access to official registration and inspection data, including historic odometer readings.
Spain — DGT. The Dirección General de Tráfico provides vehicle reports, though the more detailed ones require identifying yourself electronically. The basic technical and administrative picture is available; deep history is not.
Germany is the exception, and it matters more than the rest
Germany has no free public per-VIN history service for buyers. The Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt maintains the central vehicle register, but it is not a consumer self-service tool — access is restricted to authorities and specific legitimate interests.
What that means in practice: for a German car, your free sources are the documents the seller chooses to show you. The service book. The HU/TÜV report. The invoices. All of them are in the seller’s control, and all of them can be incomplete.
Germany is also the largest used-car exporter in Europe. So the country with the least free transparency is the one supplying the most cross-border cars.
Where every free service stops: the border
Each national register only sees the car’s life inside that country. Export a car, re-register it, and the recorded history effectively starts again.
A 2019 car imported from Germany to Poland in 2024 shows a Polish record beginning in 2024. Five years of mileage, inspections and any damage sit on the German side of the border, and the free Polish service cannot see them. The same is true in reverse, and across every border in Europe.
That gap is not a small one. It is precisely where rolled-back odometers and repaired accident damage survive, because the paperwork trail resets.
What to do with this
- Run the free service for the country of registration. If it covers your car fully, you may not need to pay anyone.
- Look for a short history on an older car. That is the import tell.
- If the car crossed a border — or is German — the free tier cannot finish the job. Cross-referencing registers in more than one country is the only way to recover the missing years.
That is the honest line. Free tools are genuinely good in the UK, the Netherlands, Poland and Belgium, and you should use them before spending anything. They fail on exactly one thing, and it is the thing that costs the most money to get wrong.
Automano’s VIN decoder is free and unlimited, with no signup, if you want to confirm the specification before you go further. The paid report exists for the cross-border case — €7.90, one payment, no subscription — and it draws on the same official registers named above rather than replacing them.