Terms of Use

Last updated: 15 September 2026

These terms of use ("Terms") explain how you may use the Car Control website at [carcontrol.co.uk] (the "Site"), the free preview we provide on it, and the paid vehicle reports and report pack you can buy on it (together, the "Service"). Please read them before you use the Site or buy a report. By using the Site, or by paying for a report or pack, you agree to these Terms.

The Site is operated by [Company Legal Name] Ltd, a company registered in [England and Wales] under company number [Company Number], with its registered office at [Registered Office Address] ("we", "us", "our"). Our VAT number, if we are registered for VAT, is [VAT Number, if registered]. You can contact us at [support@carcontrol.co.uk] or see our Contact page for full details.

1. What the Service is

Car Control lets you look up information about a vehicle by entering its UK registration number.

Free preview. When you search a registration, we show you a free preview at no charge. This tells you the vehicle's make, model, colour, fuel type and year, whether it is currently taxed, its current MOT status and expiry date, how many MOT tests are on record (passes and fails) and the date range they cover, and a count of how many mileage issues and how many MOT issues we have found in the records, without showing you what those issues are. We only tell you a count where we have actually found something in the records: the preview never states or implies that an issue exists if none was found. The free preview does not tell you anything about insurance write-off history, outstanding finance or stolen status, because we only obtain that information from our commercial data supplier when a Premium report is bought. Where the preview mentions this at all, it only says that a Premium report checks it, not what the answer is.

Paid reports. If you want the full analysis, you can buy one of the following, each as a one-off purchase with no subscription and no recurring charge:

Basic report, £3.99, for one vehicle;
Premium report, £6.99, for one vehicle; or
3 Premium reports pack, £12.99, which gives you one Premium report for the vehicle you searched, supplied straight away, plus 2 credits you can use for a Premium report on other vehicles within 12 months of your purchase.

[Prices include VAT, if we are VAT registered.] Nothing renews automatically under any of these options. Section 3 sets out exactly what each tier contains and what it does not contain, and section 7 explains how the pack and its credits work.

The underlying MOT test records used in the free preview and in every paid tier are also available free of charge directly from GOV.UK, at gov.uk/check-mot-history. When you pay for a Basic or Premium report, you are paying for our analysis of those records, the way we present it, and the convenience of having it produced for you. When you pay for a Premium report or the pack, you are also paying for the additional commercial vehicle history, valuation and specification data described in section 3, which is not free elsewhere. See section 3 and our Data sources page for more on this.

2. Information only, not a substitute for your own checks

The Service, including every paid report, is provided for general information purposes only. It is not advice, and it is not a substitute for:

physically inspecting the vehicle;
checking the vehicle's V5C registration certificate and confirming it matches the vehicle and seller;
getting an independent mechanical inspection before you buy; and
obtaining your own further checks on anything a report does not cover, as listed in section 3.

We strongly recommend you take these steps before buying, selling, insuring or financing a vehicle. Do not rely on the Service alone when making a decision about a vehicle.

3. What each tier contains, and what it does not

Every paid tier is built from DVSA MOT History data and, for the Basic and Premium reports, DVLA vehicle record data where this is available for the registration you search. The Premium report and the pack also draw on a commercial vehicle history, valuation and specification data supplier, CheckCarDetails Ltd. See our Data sources page for full detail on where each piece of information comes from.

3.1 Basic report, £3.99

The Basic report contains:

a full mileage timeline and chart showing the odometer reading recorded at every MOT test;
every individual mileage reading on record;
flags where a later reading is lower than an earlier one;
gaps between MOT tests;
any tests where the odometer could not be read;
the vehicle's average annual mileage, compared with the average figure published in the Department for Transport's National Travel Survey 2024;
every MOT test on record, including failures, defects and advisories noted at each test;
recurring problems flagged across more than one test; and
vehicle details, where available, such as tax status, MOT status, the date the last V5C was issued, and CO2 emissions.

3.2 Premium report, £6.99

The Premium report contains everything in the Basic report, plus the following vehicle history, valuation and specification data from CheckCarDetails Ltd:

insurance write-off records, including the write-off category, the date of loss, the insurer, and the parts of the vehicle recorded as damaged;
outstanding finance records, including the finance company, the type of agreement, its term, and the date it was recorded;
stolen vehicle records, including the date reported and the police force that recorded it;
whether the vehicle is recorded as scrapped, including any certificate of destruction;
whether the vehicle is recorded as exported or imported, including imports from outside the EU;
plate change history, showing previous and current registrations;
colour change history;
the date the vehicle was first registered;
the number of previous keepers and the dates their keeper changes were recorded (we do not show any personal details of those keepers, such as their names or addresses);
a market valuation for the vehicle, covering dealer forecourt, trade, private sale, part exchange and auction values; and
factory specification, such as engine, power, torque, top speed, 0 to 60 mph time, fuel economy, dimensions, weights, and Euro NCAP safety rating, where available.

If our commercial data supplier, CheckCarDetails Ltd, holds no historical records at all for your vehicle, so we cannot check write-off, finance or stolen status, we still deliver your Premium report with the MOT and mileage analysis described in section 3.1. In that case we automatically add one free Premium credit to your account, valid for 12 months, in addition to, not instead of, your statutory rights. See our Cancellation and Refund Policy for full detail.

3.3 3 Premium reports pack, £12.99

The pack gives you a Premium report for the vehicle you have just searched, containing everything described in section 3.2, supplied to you straight away. It also gives you 2 credits, each of which you can redeem for one Premium report on one other vehicle of your choice, at any point within 12 months of the date you bought the pack. Section 7 explains how credits are held and redeemed, and what happens if you do not use them.

3.4 What no tier includes

None of the Basic report, the Premium report or the pack includes, and we do not provide as part of the Service at any tier:

service history;
previous adverts for the vehicle;
a data guarantee or compensation scheme of any kind: we do not guarantee that the underlying data is complete, accurate or up to date, and we do not offer any compensation scheme if it is not, beyond the statutory rights and refund position described in sections 8 and 9; or
personal details of any keeper, such as a name or address, at any tier.

We tell you what a tier does and does not include again before you pay, as set out in section 5.

4. Accuracy of information, and no data guarantee

We take reasonable care with the Site and with every report, but we do not create the underlying vehicle, MOT and vehicle history data. That data comes from DVSA and, where available, DVLA, and, for the Premium tier and pack, from CheckCarDetails Ltd, and we display and analyse it as we receive it. We cannot guarantee that this data is complete, accurate, up to date or error free, because we have no control over how or when the vehicle keeper, garages, DVSA, DVLA or CheckCarDetails Ltd record or update it. Our own analysis, such as mileage flags, gap detection or comparisons, is based on that same underlying data and inherits any gaps or errors in it. There is no data guarantee attached to any report: we do not promise a specific level of accuracy or completeness in the underlying data, and we do not operate a compensation scheme for inaccuracies in it. See the limitations explained on our Data sources page.

Nothing on the Site, and nothing in a Basic report, a Premium report or a pack, is, or should be treated as, confirmation that a vehicle is free from any defect, has not been in an accident, has not been written off, is not subject to finance, or has not been reported stolen.

5. Buying a report or pack: pre-contract information and how the contract is formed

Before you pay, we show you, on the Site or at checkout: the total price of the tier or pack you have chosen, what it contains and does not contain (as set out in section 3), that the underlying MOT records are also available free from GOV.UK, when the content is delivered, and the cancellation position that applies to it, including, for the pack, the different position for the first report and for the 2 unused credits described in section 7. For a single Basic or Premium report, and for the first, immediately supplied report in the pack, you must tick a box giving your express consent to immediate delivery of that report and confirming you understand you lose your right to cancel for that report, before the "Pay" button becomes active. This forms part of the information we are required to give you under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013.

Placing an order is an offer by you to buy that report or pack, which we accept when we generate and provide you with access to the first report covered by your order. Payment is taken before we generate that report. The button you use to place your order is labelled clearly to make it obvious that placing the order involves an obligation to pay us, in line with regulation 14 of those Regulations.

6. Price and payment

The price of a Basic report is £3.99, of a Premium report is £6.99, and of the 3 Premium reports pack is £12.99, per vehicle or pack, at the time of writing. These are the total prices you pay: there are no hidden fees or extra charges added at checkout. [If we are VAT registered, these prices include VAT at the applicable rate.] We may change our prices from time to time; the price shown to you at checkout is the price that applies to your purchase. We do not describe any tier as the cheapest or best value option on the market, and we do not make price comparison claims about our own or any competing service.

Payment is processed by Stripe Payments UK Ltd ("Stripe") through Stripe Checkout. You are taken to a page hosted by Stripe to enter your card details. We do not see or store your full card details at any point; Stripe handles this in line with its own terms and privacy notice. Stripe collects your email address so that it can send you a payment receipt. Our Privacy Notice explains how we use the order information Stripe passes back to us.

7. Delivery, access, and the pack and its credits

Immediately after your payment is confirmed, your report opens in your browser. You also receive access to it through a private link, which stays valid for 30 days from the date of purchase or, for a report redeemed from a pack credit, from the date of redemption. Each report is a snapshot of the MOT, DVLA and, where relevant, CheckCarDetails records as they stood at the time it was produced; it is not updated automatically if those records change afterwards. Tokens that let your browser reopen a private link, and, for a pack, a token that identifies your pack and the credits remaining on it, are stored in your browser's local storage on your device, as explained in our Cookie Policy. Your pack link and code are also sent to you in your confirmation email, so that you are not solely reliant on local storage on one device or browser.

If you buy the pack, your first Premium report is generated and delivered to you straight away, in the same way as a single report purchase, and the consent described in section 5 applies to that report. Your remaining 2 credits are not yet supplied: no report is generated against a credit until you choose to redeem it for a specific registration. When you redeem a credit, we ask you to tick the same form of consent again, confirming you want that report generated and delivered immediately and that you understand you lose the right to cancel for that specific report once it has been delivered. We ask for this fresh consent at the point of redemption because that is when the digital content for that credit is actually about to be supplied.

Unused credits expire 12 months after the date you bought the pack, and cannot be redeemed after that. Section 8 explains the cancellation position for unused credits.

8. The 14-day cancellation right, and the pack's unused credits

A report is digital content, not goods. Under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, you would normally have 14 days to change your mind about a purchase of digital content. Because we generate and deliver a report to you immediately, before that 14-day period would otherwise end, the law lets us do this only if you give us your express consent to immediate delivery and acknowledge that you will lose your right to cancel that content once delivery has started.

Single Basic or Premium report. Once you tick the consent box described in section 5 and complete payment, your report is generated and delivered straight away and you no longer have the right to cancel that purchase for a change of mind. Section 9 explains when you can still get a refund.

The first report in a pack. The same position applies to the Premium report supplied to you immediately as part of your pack purchase: once delivered, you cannot cancel that report for a change of mind.

The 2 unused credits in a pack. The 2 credits are digital content that has not yet been supplied to you, because no report has been generated against them. We consider that you keep your normal 14-day right to cancel this part of your purchase. If, within 14 days of buying the pack, you have not redeemed one or both credits, you can cancel in respect of the unused credit or credits and we will refund you a fair proportion of the £12.99 price for each unused credit you cancel, calculated as set out in section 9. Once you redeem a credit, by ticking the fresh consent described in section 7 and having that report delivered to you, your right to cancel in respect of that credit ends in the same way as for a single report, even if this happens within the first 14 days. After 14 days from your purchase of the pack, any credit that is still unused can no longer be cancelled for a refund under this section, but remains valid to redeem until it expires 12 months after purchase, as described in section 7.

After you pay, or after you redeem a credit, we send you a confirmation by email from [Email Provider], to the email address Stripe has collected for your receipt. That confirmation records the consent you gave, together with a copy of the relevant access link or, for a pack purchase, your pack link and the number of credits remaining, so that you have this information on a durable medium.

9. Refunds and your statutory rights

Because you consent to immediate delivery of digital content, you cannot get a refund simply because you change your mind after a report has been produced, or after a credit has been redeemed. This does not affect your other rights, including the cancellation right for unused pack credits described in section 8, or your statutory rights below.

We will give you a full refund for a report we cannot produce, for example because there is no MOT history available for the registration you searched, because our commercial data supplier's data is unavailable for that registration, because of a technical failure on our side, or because we generated a report for the wrong vehicle due to our error.

Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, if a report is not as described, or is not of satisfactory quality because of a fault on our part, you are entitled to a repair or replacement (a corrected report), or, where that is not possible or does not fix the problem, a price reduction or a refund. This is a statutory right and these Terms do not take it away.

Full details of how to ask for a refund, how a pro rata refund on unused credits is calculated, our response times, and how refunds are paid are set out in our Cancellation and Refund Policy, which forms part of these Terms.

10. Using the Site fairly

You agree that you will not:

use the Site or Service for any unlawful purpose, including to stalk, harass or trace an individual;
use automated means (bots, scrapers or similar) to make bulk or repeated queries against the Site, or to attempt to buy reports or packs in bulk, except with our prior written permission;
attempt to gain unauthorised access to the Site, our systems, or any data we hold, including another person's pack link, code or credits;
copy, resell, sublicense or redistribute the Service, a report, a pack, or any data obtained through it, as a competing product without our permission and without complying with the licensing terms described in our Data sources page; or
misrepresent results from the Service, or a report, as an official DVSA or DVLA record, as data from CheckCarDetails Ltd presented as our own, or as a guarantee of a vehicle's condition or history.

We may suspend or block access to the Site for anyone we reasonably believe is misusing it, including excessive automated querying that risks our access to the DVSA, DVLA or CheckCarDetails Ltd data, or attempted payment fraud.

11. Intellectual property

The Site design, text, layout and our own analysis features, including in every report, belong to us or our licensors and are protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. The underlying government vehicle and MOT data is Crown copyright and is made available under the Open Government Licence v3.0, as described on our Data sources page. The commercial vehicle history, valuation and specification data supplied for the Premium report and pack belongs to CheckCarDetails Ltd or its own licensors and is provided to you for your personal use only. You may view, print and keep a copy of your own report for your personal, non-commercial use. You must not otherwise copy, reproduce, resell or exploit any part of the Site or a report without our permission, except to the extent the Open Government Licence permits reuse of the underlying government data itself.

12. No warranties

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Service, including the free preview, the Basic report, the Premium report and the pack, is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including as to accuracy, completeness, reliability, availability or fitness for a particular purpose. As set out in section 4, we give no data guarantee.

13. Limitation of liability

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded under the laws of England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, including under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

Subject to the paragraph above, and to the extent permitted by law, we are not liable to you for:

any decision you make to buy, sell, finance or insure a vehicle based on information shown by the free preview, a Basic report, a Premium report or the pack;
any loss or damage arising from inaccuracies, gaps or delays in the underlying DVSA, DVLA or CheckCarDetails Ltd data;
any indirect or consequential loss; or
loss that was not reasonably foreseeable to both you and us at the time of your purchase.

Subject always to the first paragraph of this section, our total liability to you arising out of or in connection with a single report is limited to the price you paid for that report, and our total liability to you arising out of or in connection with the pack is limited to the price you paid for the pack. This reflects the low price and general information nature of the Service and does not affect the statutory rights described in section 9.

This section does not affect your statutory rights as a consumer.

14. Open Government Licence and no endorsement

Government data used in the Service is reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0, as explained on our Data sources page. This does not mean that DVSA, DVLA, or any other government department or the Crown, endorses Car Control, our analysis, or any conclusion in a report. We also do not state or imply that CheckCarDetails Ltd endorses Car Control or our analysis. We do not state or imply any such endorsement anywhere on the Site or in a report.

15. Changes to the Service and these Terms

We may change or withdraw all or part of the Service at any time, for example if DVSA, DVLA or CheckCarDetails Ltd change or withdraw access to their data, if we change our prices, or if we need to comply with a change in the law. We may also update these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes we will update the "last updated" date at the top of this page. A change to these Terms after you have bought a report or pack does not affect the report or pack you have already bought, other than any unused credits, which remain subject to the terms in force when you redeem them.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. If you are a consumer resident in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may also bring proceedings in the courts of Scotland or Northern Ireland respectively, and mandatory consumer protections of the place where you live continue to apply to you. Nothing in these Terms affects your right, as a consumer, to rely on mandatory local consumer protection laws or to bring a claim in your local courts. The UK is no longer part of the EU's Online Dispute Resolution platform, so that platform is not available for disputes about a purchase from us; you can use the complaints route in section 17 instead.

17. Contact and complaints

If you have a question, complaint, or concern about the Site, the Service, a report or the pack, please see our Contact page, our Cancellation and Refund Policy, or email [support@carcontrol.co.uk]. We aim to acknowledge complaints promptly and to deal with them fairly.

18. Accounts

You do not need an account to buy a report or the pack: paying through Stripe Checkout with your email address is enough, as described in section 6. Whether or not you sign in, your purchases are linked to the email address used at checkout, so signing in later with that same email lets you see them.

An account is created automatically for the email address used at checkout, so that you can sign in later if you want to. You can also sign in, or create an account, at any time using one of the following, without a password: a 6-digit one-time code sent to your email, valid for 10 minutes; a one-time sign-in link sent to your email, valid for 15 minutes; or "Sign in with Google". If you use Google, we receive only your Google account email address, whether it is verified, and a Google account identifier; we do not receive your Google contacts or any other Google data. Section 6 of our Privacy Notice explains how Google is involved as a sign-in provider.

Your account stores your email address, your Google account identifier if you have used Google sign-in, the dates your account was created and last signed into, and your active sign-in sessions. The "My account" page shows any unused Premium credits and their expiry dates, reports that are still within their 30-day access period, and your past orders.

You can delete your account at any time from the account page. Deleting your account removes your account record and signs you out everywhere. Any unused Premium credits are lost when you delete your account. We keep order records for 6 years for tax and accounting purposes, as explained in section 7 of our Privacy Notice, even after you delete your account.