Our method

How we recover a missing service history

This page describes the whole process, including the parts that fail. If you are about to pay someone to find your car's service records, you should know exactly what they are going to do and what they cannot do.

Last reviewed: September 2026

Why a service history has to be recovered rather than looked up

The UK has no central register of car servicing. MOT tests are different — they are carried out by DVSA-authorised centres and logged on a government database, which is why anyone can check an MOT history for free on GOV.UK. A service is not a test. It is a private transaction between a garage and whoever owned the car that day, and no garage is required to report it to anybody.

That single fact explains almost everything about this job. It is why a lost service book is genuinely lost rather than re-printable. It is why no website can show you a full service history instantly for free — there is no database to read from. And it is why recovering a history means contacting the individual businesses that hold the records, one at a time, and asking.

We are not a data broker reselling something already public. The work is outreach.

The five stages of an investigation

Every case runs through the same sequence. Stages one and two are data work; stage three is where most of the recovered records actually come from.

  1. 01

    Identify the vehicle

    We resolve the registration to a specific vehicle through DVSA data — make, model, engine, first registration date — and pull the full public MOT record. The MOT mileage trail is not a service history, but it dates the car year by year and gives every later claim something to be checked against.

    Limit: a vehicle under three years old has no MOT record yet, so there is no mileage trail to reconcile against.

  2. 02

    Query the manufacturer record

    Several manufacturers keep a digital service record against the VIN. Where the make has one, we query it. Where it does not, we say so rather than implying a check took place. A manufacturer record only ever contains work the manufacturer's own network saw, so it is a starting point, not an answer.

    Limit: digital service records were only adopted widely in the last decade or so, and only cover franchised work.

  3. 03

    Contact the garages

    This is the substance of the service. We build a list of the businesses realistically likely to hold a record for this specific car — the franchised dealers for that make, marque specialists, and independent garages in the areas the vehicle has been registered and MOT'd — and we email them individually with the registration and VIN, asking whether they hold a service record and whether they will release a copy.

    Limit: a garage is under no obligation to reply, and some do not. Businesses that have closed cannot be reached at all.

  4. 04

    Verify and reconcile

    Every response is checked before it goes in your pack. Dates and odometer readings are reconciled against the MOT mileage trail; a service that claims a mileage the car had not yet reached gets queried, not published. Each record in the finished pack carries the source it came from.

    Limit: we can confirm what a business told us and that it is internally consistent. We cannot inspect the work itself.

  5. 05

    Deliver the pack

    You receive one dated document containing every confirmed record, its source, and a plain statement of which periods are still unaccounted for. It is yours to keep, to show a buyer, or to hand to a dealer at part-exchange.

    Limit: we report what was found. We do not certify that nothing else exists.

Who does the work

The investigation is AI-led and human-supervised. Software builds the garage list, drafts and sends the outreach, tracks which businesses replied, and assembles the pack. People set the policy those systems follow, review the replies that need judgement, and sign off what goes into a finished history.

We say this openly because the alternative — implying a person is individually phoning hundreds of garages for the price of a standard report — would not be true. Software is what makes the outreach affordable at all. Supervision is what stops it publishing something wrong.

What you can hold us to

Data protection
Registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration ZC080490, which anyone can verify on the ICO public register.
Payments
Card payments are processed by Stripe. Card details are never stored on our servers.
If we find nothing
The £120 human-takeover investigation is refunded in full if it recovers nothing beyond what you already had.

What this service cannot do

  • It cannot conjure a record of work that was never documented. Cash-in-hand servicing with no invoice leaves nothing to recover.
  • It cannot reach a garage that has closed and disposed of its records.
  • It cannot compel a business to reply. Most do; some never will.
  • It cannot guarantee a complete history. Some cars come back with a full recovered record, some with a partial one, and some with very little.
  • It is not an inspection, a valuation, or a stolen or write-off check. It is a record of servicing.

Start with the registration

The lookup identifies your car and its MOT record before you decide anything. There is no charge to see what we are working from.

Find my service history