Here’s The Carfax Hack That You Can Use To Get A Bunch Of Free Data About The Car You Want To Buy

A Carfax report is one of the best tools you can use to figure out if the used car that you want to buy has a sketchy past or not. However, a single Carfax report costs $44.99, and four reports cost $109.99. This can add up quickly if you’re looking at multiple cars, or just bought a $1,500 beater and are just curious. All is not lost. There is a way to at least get some of the information that’s contained on a Carfax report and not to having to pay a dime for it. All it takes is downloading a free app.

Back in the fall of last year, I flew out to Florida to buy one of my dream Smart Fortwo configurations. I had been looking for a second-generation Fortwo with a convertible top for years, and I always struck out. I would often find a car, then discover that it was more broken than the seller claimed, or the seller had closed a deal on the vehicle before I got there. Either way, I was feeling a bit like this year’s Colorado Rockies, which is to say ‘pretty beaten.’

But this Smart out in Florida seemed like a diamond in the rough. The seller claimed that it had all of 26,000 miles on its odometer and that it was in pretty much perfect shape. They even claimed that it had gotten services more often than Smart required in its manuals. But how do I prove something like this? Sure, I could tell from just looking at the car that it had well under 100,000 miles. But I had no way of confirming the alleged maintenance history. Now, I could have paid for a Carfax. But I’m a cheapskate, and I was about to hand over $5,800 in cash to the seller. What was I to do?

What You Can Find With A Carfax

In case you’re just as cheap as I am and you’ve never purchased a Carfax report, I’ll explain why these reports are important. A Carfax report usually has shocking levels of detail about whatever car you’re trying to buy. If the vehicle got into a fender bender and it was reported to insurance, that’ll usually show up on a Carfax. The report will often show just where the car was damaged and give you a pretty general idea of how serious the damage was.

Carfax will also display registration records, total loss reports, title status, odometer rollbacks, recalls, warranty coverage, and maintenance visits. The car you’re looking at doesn’t even have to be that special, either. Here’s a Carfax report for a 1990 Chevrolet K2500 from Bring a Trailer:

As you can see in the records, the truck passed its emissions inspection in 1992 and then was subject to a recall in 1993. Even if you don’t care about this stuff, it’s geeky data to have.

Carfax works the way it does because it is essentially a gigantic data collection operation. Carfax pulls data from your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, auctions, insurance companies, repair shops, body shops, police reports, rental car companies, fire departments, and so many more. Carfax claims that it pulls data from more than 165,000 sources and has built up a database of over 36,000,000,000 records. Apparently, more than 7,000,000 records are added daily. Yes, this means that sources with data about your car are either giving or selling this data to Carfax.

Carfax was founded in 1984 by a computer analyst and an accountant as a way to combat odometer fraud by checking odometers against vehicle records. Now, it’s a huge beast of data. That original function of Carfax still exists. If a car was registered with 150,000 miles one year and then suddenly gets registered with 50,000 miles the next year, then that’s a red flag.

There are ways to get free Carfax reports. For example, dealerships will often offer free reports with the cars that they have for sale. Just check the bottom of a dealer’s inventory listing and you might find a Carfax report. You’ll also get free Carfax reports at the bottom of Bring a Trailer listings, which is how I got the report for the K2500.

But there are limitations with Carfax. The biggest limitation is that if something doesn’t get reported, it won’t show up on Carfax. If you wreck a car and fix it yourself, that won’t show up on Carfax. Not all repair shops, and not even all repairs, also show up on Carfax. It’s entirely possible to lose a car in a flood, have it fixed, and put it back onto the market without the flood ever showing up on Carfax. The oil changes that you do by yourself also will not show up in Carfax unless you manually report them.

Carfax also misses simple stuff. For example, you’ll see that the report for the 1992 Chevy K2500 above doesn’t have an entry for when it was originally registered. Sometimes, this means that Carfax might get the number of owners wrong or miss registration records. I’ve even seen Carfax reports accidentally add an additional owner to a vehicle that had never been sold by its original owner.

That’s why I say that Carfax is one of the best car-buying tools out there, but it absolutely should not be the only tool that you use. Unless you’re buying some $1,500 pile of crap, you should get an independent pre-purchase inspection.

Getting Much Of A Carfax For Free

Anyway, I got desperate, even starting a membership for a Carfax competitor called Bumper, which had nothing useful for my Smart. I then started looking up how to get cheaper Carfax reports when I ran into an advertisement for the Carfax Car Care App, which said that you could get basic maintenance and registration history for your car. I downloaded it, figuring that I’d probably get stuck at a paywall or something.

Instead, I was surprised that, once I plugged in the car’s VIN (you can also use license plate number and state), the Carfax app opened up with a shocking amount of data. The app won’t give you a full report, but it does give you some of the most important things that you need to know about a used car.

In my case, the app displayed every single  maintenance record and some registration records since my Smart was new. True to the seller’s word, my Smart had been owned by the same guy for almost all of its life, and he took the car to the dealership at least twice a year for service, even if the car didn’t actually need a repair or maintenance. What’s pretty cool is that, while the app doesn’t give you full reports, it still drills down pretty deep. It’ll tell you what services were performed and at what service center.

The app is pretty upfront that it’s giving you limited information. You can view some registration info, recalls, odometer readings, and service records, but if you’re looking for pretty much any other kind of record, Carfax directs you to buy a report. But you know what? That’s still a chunk of data that you can get for free. Sure, you might not be able to know if your car had been crashed, but at least you might be able to fact-check if the seller was fibbing about the vehicle’s maintenance history. That’s more than enough for me.

The Carfax Car Care app is available on both Android and Apple devices, and it’s free to download and use. The car that you add to the app will stay there until you delete it. You can also use the app to report new maintenance and fuel records, as well as some other functions. But I suspect most people will want the app to check out previous history.

To be completely transparent here, this is not a partner post or anything like that. It was just a trick I found out that saved me from buying a report.

So, if you’re looking at a car for sale and you just want to know about its maintenance history, the Carfax app won’t give you everything, but it could give you more than enough to determine whether the car you’re looking at is worth buying. In the worst case, I suppose $44.99 isn’t that bad.