About the author

Sam White runs CarCheck123, helping UK used-car buyers avoid expensive mistakes. Every guide is checked against official DVLA, DVSA and gov.uk sources.

That second sentence is the part worth expanding on, because it is the only reason to trust any of this.

How these guides are written

Used-car advice is easy to write badly. The facts move — VED bands change every April, clean air zones expand, consumer law gets misquoted until the wrong version is the one everybody repeats. Most of what ranks for these questions is written once and never touched again.

So the process here is deliberately slow.

Every factual claim is verified against a primary source before publication. Not a comparison site, not another guide — the legislation itself, DVLA and DVSA guidance, gov.uk, or the trade body that actually sets the thing being described. Where a claim cannot be verified against a primary source, it is cut or hedged rather than softened into something that sounds confident.

The verification is written down and kept. Each guide has a record listing every claim, the verdict on it, the source that settled it, and any correction that was applied. Those records are reviewed, not filed and forgotten — and they carry their own expiry dates, because a source that was right in March can be wrong by April.

Claims with a shelf life are dated. Anything tied to a rate, a threshold or a scheme carries a review date, and the guide comes back for re-checking when that date falls due rather than when someone happens to notice.

A second, independent pass reads every article before it publishes, checking that clearer writing has not quietly changed what a sentence claims. It is surprisingly easy to improve a sentence and break it at the same time: drop the word "usually", tighten "up to £100" into "£100", or let a pronoun drift onto the wrong noun. That pass exists because it has caught exactly those things.

What you will not find here

No invented statistics. No made-up expert quotes. No confident figure that cannot be traced back to something published — if the honest answer is that nobody has measured it, the guide says so instead of borrowing a number that sounds authoritative.

Guides say what a check can tell you and, just as plainly, what it cannot. A history check reports what was recorded at the moment you ran it. It is not a mechanical inspection and it never becomes one.

When we get it wrong

Sometimes a guide is wrong. Sources are misread, rules change, and a figure that was correct on the day of writing stops being correct.

When that happens the guide is corrected and the correction is recorded — not quietly overwritten. If you have spotted something that looks wrong, say so and it will be checked against the primary source rather than argued about.

Advice about spending thousands of pounds should be held to that standard.

Scope

Everything here is written for the UK — British English, UK law, UK rules. Where Scotland or Northern Ireland differ from England and Wales, the guide says so, because those differences are real and routinely ignored elsewhere.