AA car check vs Car Advert Check at a glance
Two tables, both read off The AA Vehicle Check’s own site. The first is the job we rank on: what the check does with the records. “No” means nothing on their site describes it, not that they can’t.
| Provider | Reads the advert | MOT advisory analysis | Known faults with costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Car Advert CheckOur pick | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| The AA Vehicle Check | No | No | No |
Prices and features checked on 17 September 2026, read off each provider's own site: “No” means nothing on their site describes it. Providers change them; tell us if one has.
| Provider | One full check | Free tier | Data guarantee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Car Advert CheckOur pick | See pricing | Free scan: reads the advert against the DVSA MOT history, verdict, risk score and biggest finding, no card and no password | None stated |
| The AA Vehicle Check | £14.99 (single check) | None on the vehicle-check page. A separate free check on AA Cars listings shows stolen, write-off, plate and colour changes, latest mileage, import and keepers, not finance | Up to £30,000 to cover any inaccuracies in the report |
Prices and features checked on 17 September 2026, read off each provider's own site. Providers change them; tell us if one has.
Where AA car check beats us
Same HPI data as the market leader, a £30,000 guarantee, and the cheapest per-car price for someone checking several cars. It’s the one to buy for HPI data at £6 a car in a five-pack.
Two things stand out on the AA's page. The first is the five-pack, which takes the per-car price well below its single check for someone test-driving a few cars, and the AA's name on the report counts for something at a private sale. The second is what the sample report leaves out: it uses the same template as HPI's own sample, and it has no MOT section at all. That's the public, free record that tells you most about how a car has been kept, and the AA's report doesn't bring it in.
We go the other way. The MOT advisory history is the first thing our report reads, every advisory the car has had, with the ones that keep coming back flagged. Then the advert, then the model's known faults. The AA's own free check on AA Cars listings is genuinely useful too: stolen, write-off, plate and colour changes, mileage, import and keepers, though not finance. Use it if you're browsing on AA Cars, and read the advert with ours before you go.
What The AA Vehicle Check describes on its own site
Straight from the pages listed under Sources, with nothing filled in from anywhere else. Where the site didn’t show something, the row says so rather than guessing.
- Free tier
- None on the vehicle-check page. A separate free check on AA Cars listings shows stolen, write-off, plate and colour changes, latest mileage, import and keepers, not finance
- One full check
- £14.99 (single check)
- Multi-check or packs
- Five checks at £6 each
- Data guarantee
- Up to £30,000 to cover any inaccuracies in the report
- Sources it names
- HPI Limited, a Solera company (their wording); Police National Computer; DVLA
What its pages describe beyond the lookup: The sample report has no MOT section at all.
Read off The AA Vehicle Check’s own site on 23 October 2026.
What Car Advert Check does with the same records
Start with what’s the same. Our outstanding finance, theft and write-off lookups come from the same places as everyone else’s: the lenders, the police and the insurers’ write-off register. Nobody holds a private source, and we’re not selling better records than AA car check.
What’s different is what happens next. A plate lookup stops at the registration. Ours carries on and reads three things no lookup takes in: the advert you’re looking at, the car’s whole DVSA MOT advisory history, and our known-faults database for that model, with what each fault costs to put right. Then it gives you one verdict instead of a page of fields, and outstanding finance, a theft marker or a write-off sends that verdict straight to its highest risk rating, because none of those is something you negotiate around.
Where it earns its keep is a car that comes back clean on the registers. A standard check stops there and the car looks fine. Ours keeps going: if the advert says “full service history”, the MOT record shows the same suspension advisory three years running and the engine is one with a known fault at this age, the report says the description doesn’t match the car’s own record, what the fault would cost, and what to ask before you travel.
What it won’t do: we offer no data guarantee, we can’t see a car’s history from before it came to the UK, we don’t sell a car’s past adverts, and nothing we or anyone else sells can see accident damage that never became a claim or how well a repair was done. Those take your eyes and a ramp.
So which should you run?
You’ve got an advert open and you’re deciding whether it’s worth the drive. Run the free scan on that advert. It reads the wording against the car’s DVSA MOT history and tells you the biggest thing to worry about, with no card and no password.
You’re about to hand money over. Upgrade that report to the Provenance Check. It adds the outstanding finance, theft and write-off records, scores them in with everything else, and includes the Smart Check, so the seller questions and a figure to negotiate with come with it.
You need what AA car check does that we don’t. Buy it. The section above says what that is, and we’d rather you had the right check than ours.
You lose nothing by starting free: the free report upgrades on the same link with no re-run, so you never paste the advert twice, and if the free scan already says walk away, you’ve saved yourself the rest.