How does CarFax build a history on your car? Every time your car goes in the shop, I am sure it is entered into the shop’s computer system. Does Carfax tap into these systems automatically? And, if so, how can extensive work done on my car at a reputable dealership not appear in the CarFax report?
Also, CarFax can find your vehicle by VIN. I entered my VIN based on my latest receipt from my mechanic. But, CarFax recognized there is no such vehicle and suggested four possible VINs. Yes, my mechanic transposed two characters. This makes me wonder if CarFax can tell the mechanic there’s no such VIN. What if a mechanic fat-fingers the VIN in the shop computer? Assuming this gets picked up by CarFax, Is there a whole bunch of CarFax records sitting in limbo under erroneous VINs?
How does this all work? And, how much (if any) is automated / auto-populated from the shop computer system directly into CarFax?
I believe they rely more on insurance, DMV, and recall records than they do auto repair reports. The greatest benefit of CarFax is finding out if the vehicle has a collision history, and that will more often than not be found in insurance records. CarFax isn’t a reliable source for a complete maintenance record. Unless you completely trust the sole-owner seller, nothing is.
A fat-fingered mechanic can definitely cause issues. I had a car recently that had lived its entire life in North Carolina, bought new by me at the dealer, that had 21,000 miles on it. Tried to get an offer from Carvana and their AutoCheck report (similar to CarFax) showed that the car had been serviced in San Diego when it had 88,000 miles on it…some mechanic had mistyped a VIN.
It was actually pretty easy to get AutoCheck to remove the error…I just showed them service records that were more recent than the erroneous report showing that the car had less miles.
It took days and days and days to get Carvana to refresh the report to the corrected one, though. Many times I thought about how some tiny error by a mechanic a couple of thousand miles away was costing me countless hours sitting on the phone to correct.
An algorithm is worthless if you don’t use it. (There is a credit card algorithm too but there is so much at stake that every credit card processor checks, and most web sites do a client-side check before they even let you submit the page.)
Carfax almost certainly does. But check digits don’t catch every possible error.
E.g. If 123456 and 124379 have the same check digit then a mechanic or clerk who inputs one instead of the other will create undetectable database pollution where car A now has service or crash history or whatever that should be connected to car B.
Now, any idea how CarFax picks up data from some mechanics and not others? Maybe it’s as simple as they have to “click” to agree to share their information with CarFax?
Shops must opt-in to the Carfax system. Some do, some don’t. I get my oil changes done at a Grease Monkey, and they have opted in. Discount Tire, where I bought my tires and get them rotated, does not participate in Carfax; I have to manually enter any work I have done there.
The most important Carfax records are from the state motor vehicle regulators. They know when it was titled and how many times it was sold, whether it was registered to a cab company or fleet operator, whether it went to a public auction, if it had an accident that was reported to the police, and if it was totaled. If there are state safety and emissions inspections, those are listed too, along with the mileage numbers, so you know if the odometer was rolled back between these events. Cars subject to recall are available on government websites and I believe that manufacturers provide the NHTSA with listings of the cars that have received the repairs. Carfax likely gets this from the NHTSA.
These records aren’t perfect. I had an on track accident that was not covered by insurance and I paid to fix it out of pocket, so there is no Carfax record.
I’ve wondered about this too. I guess that there is probably software that many garages use to manage their business and the software has a backdoor feature of reporting that information to CarFax. I don’t know if it’s true. Something I read online from an unreliable source says that I’m wrong. It says that shops have to pay Carfax to report service data. I don’t see what’s in it for the shop to do so.
Another possibility is that dealerships are both big consumers and big providers of data to CarFax. Carfax may contract with dealer groups to get their service records as part of the same contracts in which they sell bulk CarFax reports to the dealer, which uses them to evaluate trades and to reassure customers of the quality of their used cars.
Yeah, my truck got hit by a taxicab while parked in front of my house, and Yellow Cab chose to pay it all out of pocket, rather than get insurance involved. Worked for me (didn’t go on my insurance either), and doesn’t show up on CarFax or anything like that either. Plus, they weren’t trying to nickel and dime the body shop like an insurance company would either.
I would think that any sort of maintenance record on CarFax would be necessarily incomplete; they’re not going to have interfaces to every single automotive shop computer system, not all shops have systems, not all are going to opt-in to reporting their work, and so on. Then there’s the obvious situation of user-performed maintenance. I did my own oil changes for something like 75k miles on my pickup, and finally just started getting them done fairly recently because I got cheap and lazy (quit using synthetic oil on a 15 year old, 110k miles pickup). So none of that except the last year or two is going to be in any system.
I would imagine that most shops would decline to opt in, unless there was some kind of incentive. Is this true, and if so, what incentive does CarFax offer to those shops?
I’d sooner believe the incentive exists at the level of the software companies that develop car repair management software / websites. CarFax will pay the software company for the data their product naturally accumulates from their customers the repair shops.
The repair shops’ interest is in having a software product that meets their needs and is easy / cheap. To the degree Carfax (and/or their competitors) are paying a subsidy to the software vendor, the software product can be offered more cheaply than one not being subsidized by Carfax. So there is an incentive for the car shop to use software vendor X over Y, even if the shop owner doesn’t exactly know why vendor X’s product costs less.
Just be glad that it wasn’t a DMV mistake. I had the DMV fat finger the mileage on my car, I think it was 199,000 rather than 19,000. Months of hell trying to get it corrected so I could sell the car.
Having tried / failed to get full value from Carfax for my last two vehicles, I can vouch for the fact that they often produce incomplete reports. A carfax report seeming “clean” is in no way a guarantee the car is trouble-free. Also, it may miss repairs and improvements that would actually increase the value of the car. Hence I’m really skeptical about relying too much on carfax.
I did some work on my truck (new springs, brakes, etc.) and wanted to update the carfax maintenance records, but I had to be registered as some sort of service provider, and at the time I thought it was too much effort.
I have found signs that my current car has been in a minor fender/bender at some point in the past, for which some minor repair work was done (not complete, hence I was able to notice the issues). There was no sign of this in the carfax records for this car.