The Honest John alternative: how to research a used car for free

If your used-car routine used to start on Honest John, it needs rebuilding. The site closed in August 2026 and the checks you did there are now spread across several places, some ours and some official. Here's how to run all of them on one car, in about ten minutes, without paying for anything.

What's the best Honest John alternative?

There isn't a single like-for-like one, and anybody telling you otherwise is overselling. What Honest John did was bundle four different jobs into one site, and those four jobs now live in four places:

For the individual car rather than the model, the official free services are unbeatable and always were: MOT history, the DVLA vehicle enquiry and the recall checker. Honest John never replaced those and neither do we. There's a fuller breakdown in what happened to Honest John.

The rest of this is the practical bit: how to run one car through all of it, in order.

Step one: what does this model go wrong with?

Start with the model, before you get attached to the specific car. Go to common problems, pick the make, pick the model, then find the generation that matches the year in the advert.

What you're reading for is not "does this car have faults", because every car has faults. You're looking for the two or three rows that match the exact engine and year in front of you. A Nissan Qashqai page carries faults for the J10 and the J11, for petrol and diesel, for manual and CVT. Only a handful apply to the car you're looking at, and those are the ones worth memorising before you ring the seller.

Three things on each row do the work:

• The engine variant. "All Xtronic CVT automatics" is a completely different warning from "1.5 dCi". If the advert doesn't say which gearbox or engine, that's your first question.
• The typical repair cost. A UK range rather than a quote. It tells you whether this is a haggling point or a walk-away.
• The source badge. Owner reports, Editorial, Specialist mechanic or Official recall. They're different weights of evidence and you should treat them differently.

Recalls sit in the same table at £0, because having one done is free. Whether it has actually been done on this car is something you check separately on the DVSA recall service with the registration.

Step two: does it really do what the advert claims to the gallon?

Now the running costs. Go to Real MPG, find the same model and generation, and read the row for the engine in the advert.

Two columns matter. The owner-reported average is what people actually get. The percentage of official tells you how flattering the brochure figure was, and an asterisk means it's measured against the newer WLTP test rather than the older NEDC one, so asterisked and non-asterisked percentages aren't comparable. As a rule, an NEDC-era car returning about 80% of official is normal, and there's a full explanation in why your MPG is lower than the official figure.

This step is where a lot of buyers save themselves from the wrong car entirely. A small turbocharged petrol with a spectacular brochure figure can return a fifth less than the advert's "cheap to run" implies, and if you're doing 20,000 miles a year that difference matters more than the price difference between two cars on the same forecourt.

Step three: what has this specific car actually done?

Everything above is about the model. This step is about the one car, and it's free and official: put the registration into gov.uk's MOT history service. You get every test, every mileage reading, every failure and every advisory, going back years.

Read it as a sequence rather than a list. What you're looking for is mileage that climbs steadily and then doesn't, advisories that appear year after year without ever becoming a repair, big gaps where the car wasn't tested, and failures for things the model is known for. A recurring "nearside front suspension arm has slight play" that has been quietly copied forward for three tests is a job nobody has done, and it's a job you'd be buying.

What do the source badges actually mean?

They tell you how much weight to put on a row, and they're on every fault we publish:

Repair costs across all of them are typical UK ranges rather than quotes. What you pay depends on the car's condition and your garage.

What does this look like on a real advert?

Say the advert is a 2012 Qashqai, 1.5 dCi, 96,000 miles, "full service history, drives faultless, just needs an MOT".

• Problems page. The J10 1.5 dCi carries an EGR valve that sticks closed, which can take the turbo with it, at £800 to £2,000. It also carries timing belt failure, sometimes caused by a failed auxiliary belt getting into the timing belt, at £3,000 to £5,500. At 96,000 miles the belt question is the whole conversation.
• Real MPG. Look up what J10 1.5 dCi owners actually average, so "cheap to run" becomes a number you can budget against rather than a phrase in an advert.
• MOT history. Check whether the mileage climbs sensibly to 96,000, whether there are advisories that keep reappearing, and whether the last test was recent or the car has been sat.
• The advert itself. "Just needs an MOT" on a car with a known belt interval question is a sentence to ask about, not skip past. So is "drives faultless" from a seller who hasn't mentioned the cambelt.

Four passes, all free, and by the end you know exactly what to ask before you drive anywhere.

What does a check add on top of all this?

Being straight about it: on the provenance records, nothing that anybody else can't get either. Outstanding finance comes from the lenders, theft markers from the police, write-off records from the insurance industry, and every check in the country reads the same registers. Nobody holds a private source.

What's different is that all four passes above happen at once, against each other, on the advert you're actually looking at. That last part is the bit no plate lookup does, because every other check in this country starts with a registration and has never read a word the seller wrote. Our free scan takes the advert text, reads it against the car's full DVSA MOT advisory history and the known faults for that exact engine and year, and hands back a verdict, a risk score and the biggest thing it found. No card, no password. The Qashqai example above is exactly the shape of it: the fault list, the advisory history and the phrase "just needs an MOT" mean something different together than they do apart, and putting them together is the actual job.

The free pages stay free regardless, and they're not a teaser. Common problems, Real MPG and the car data hub are open, complete, and there whether you ever run a scan or not, because data like this only works if everyone can check it.

What none of it can do is see unrecorded accident damage or judge the quality of a repair. Neither is in any database at any price, ours or anyone else's, which is why the last step is always looking at the car.

So: read the model pages, then run the free scan on the advert before you commit an evening to a viewing. If it turns something up worth going deeper on, the free report upgrades on the same link afterwards without re-running anything, so nothing's wasted if the answer is walk away.

The short version

There's no single Honest John replacement, because it was four things at once. Known faults are rebuilt free on our common problems pages, real-world fuel economy on Real MPG, MOT pass rates are still to come, and the reviews went to Drive.co.uk. For the individual car, gov.uk's MOT history, DVLA enquiry and recall checker are free and official and always will be. Run the model first, the car second, and read the advert against both.