What an HPI check won't tell you

The check came back clear, and you're now fairly sure the car's fine. That word is doing an enormous amount of work, and it means something far narrower than most buyers hear.

Here's what a provenance check genuinely covers, and the six things it can't tell you no matter which provider you pay.

What does an HPI check actually tell you?

It's a database lookup on the registration number, and it returns records that other organisations have already filed against that plate. Lenders file finance agreements. Police file theft reports. Insurers file write-offs. DVLA files plate changes, colour changes and keeper counts. Everything the check knows, somebody else wrote down first.

That's the whole shape of it, and it's the whole limit too.

Worth saying once: "HPI check" is shorthand. HPI is a brand, one of several providers, and the phrase has gone generic the way Hoover did. The providers compete on price and presentation, but they're drawing on broadly the same registers, so switching provider doesn't move the ceiling described below.

What won't an HPI check tell you?

Six things, and none of them are small:

• Whether the car's been crashed and repaired with no insurance claim attached
• Whether a write-off it does report was repaired competently
• Anything at all about the car's mechanical condition
• Whether this particular model has a known fault that's about to cost you money
• Whether the person selling it has any right to sell it
• Anything whatsoever about the advert you're reading

The first three are gaps in the data. The last three are outside what a registration lookup can ever do, because they're not facts about the car's paperwork.

Why doesn't a provenance check show accident damage?

Because only insurance claims get filed, and plenty of accidents never become one.

If the owner reversed into a gatepost and paid a bodyshop in cash, nothing entered any register. If the damage came in under the excess, nothing entered any register. If someone went off at a roundabout and worked out a claim would cost more in premium than the repair would cost outright, and settled it privately, nothing entered any register. That last one is extremely common.

So a car can have had a heavy front-end rebuild and still return a spotless provenance check, because the record only starts at the insurance claim and there wasn't one. A clear result means no insurer wrote this car off. It doesn't mean nobody's ever hit it.

Does a provenance check tell you if the car is mechanically any good?

No. There isn't a single field in it that describes condition.

It won't know the model clogs its DPF on short runs, that a particular gearbox wants an expensive control unit long before the car looks old, or that the last owner ignored the same MOT advisory three years running. It reports what the car has been through on paper, not what it's like to own.

That gap is expensive rather than academic. Our own known-faults database currently holds 180 documented faults across 41 makes, counting only the ones we're confident enough to act on, and virtually none of them are visible to a registration lookup. The Range Rover Evoque, BMW 3 Series and Ford Kuga all carry well-documented faults that a clean provenance result will never once mention.

The closest free proxy for condition is the MOT history, because advisories repeated across several tests tell you what's been quietly getting worse. That's covered in what free car checks actually get you, and the mileage sequence in the same record is the cheapest way to spot a clocked car.

Can a provenance check be beaten?

Yes, and cloning is how it's done.

The check runs on the plate, not on the car standing in front of you. Put an honest car's registration on a stolen or written-off one and the lookup obediently returns the honest car's clean history. Nothing in the result knows which physical vehicle you're looking at.

The only thing tying that record to the metal is the VIN. Check the number stamped at the base of the windscreen and on the driver's door pillar, confirm both match the V5C, and confirm the V5C shows the seller's name at the address you're currently standing at. A seller who gets awkward about you reading the VIN has told you something.

Does a clear finance result mean there's definitely no finance?

Almost always, but not quite certainly, and the two reasons are worth knowing.

An agreement only appears if the lender registered it, and not every lender reports to every register. And the result is a snapshot of the moment you ran it, so finance taken out after your check won't show on the printout you're holding. If a fortnight passes between checking and paying, run it again on the day. It's the cheapest part of the whole transaction and it's the one that can cost you the entire car, which is covered properly in outstanding finance on a used car.

Which of those six gaps can a check actually close?

Some of them, and it's worth being straight about which.

Nobody sells better provenance data. Every provider, us included, is pulling outstanding finance from the lenders, theft markers from the police and write-off records from the insurance industry. Those are the same three registers, and a provider claiming a deeper finance check than everyone else is selling you presentation.

The difference is what happens to the answer once it comes back.

Two of those six can't be closed by anyone, at any price, and any check that implies otherwise is overselling. The other four are the ones we built the report around.

How our report differs from a standard provenance check

Not by having more data. This is worth being blunt about, because the whole category implies otherwise.

Every provenance check sold in the UK reads the same three registers: outstanding finance from the lenders, theft markers from the police, write-off records from the insurance industry. Nobody holds a private source the rest can't see. Whichever name is on the report, if the finance result comes back clear it comes back clear on ours too, and any provider hinting otherwise is selling you presentation.

What differs is everything that happens around those records.

A standard check hands you a page of facts and leaves the interpreting to you. It'll tell you the car has two former keepers, an advisory-heavy MOT record and a Cat N marker from 2019, and then it stops, as though those three things have nothing to do with each other. Working out what they mean together, for this car, at this price, is the actual job, and it's the part you're left doing in a layby on your phone.

That's the part we do. The Provenance Check runs the same official lookups, then reads them alongside three things no provenance provider takes as an input:

• The advert itself. What the seller wrote, and more usefully what they carefully didn't. No lookup touches this, because the advert isn't data anyone files.
• The full DVSA MOT history. Not just the pass or fail, but which advisories keep coming back year after year, which is the closest thing to a condition report you can get for free.
• Our known-faults database. 228 documented faults across 41 makes, matched to this model, with what each one costs to put right.

Then it scores the lot as one verdict rather than a list. Outstanding finance, a theft marker or a write-off doesn't arrive as a line item you have to weigh up, it pushes the report to its highest risk rating outright, because those three aren't things you negotiate around. A Cat N on a car whose MOT history is already telling a story reads very differently from a Cat N on a car that's been babied, and the report says so.

The Provenance Check includes the full Smart Check, so the known faults, the repair costs, the questions to put to the seller and the figure to negotiate to all come with it rather than being a separate purchase. And if you'd rather start before paying anything, the free scan reads the advert against the MOT history and gives you a verdict and the single biggest finding, no card and no password. Any free report upgrades to the full thing later on the same link, without running anything again.

So is an HPI check worth paying for?

Yes, plainly. It's the only practical way to catch the four outcomes that cost buyers everything: repossession, a stolen car you don't get to keep, a write-off sold at clean-car money, and a clocked one. Before you read the result, it's worth knowing what Cat N and Cat S actually mean.

The mistake isn't running the check. It's reading "clear" as "good car". Clear means the four catastrophes aren't recorded. It says nothing about what the car is going to cost you eight months from now.

What to do alongside the provenance check

And then read the advert itself, properly, because that's the one source of evidence the seller wrote and the databases can't see. The wording people choose when they're steering you away from something is remarkably consistent, and we've catalogued it in advert phrases that should worry you.

A provenance check tells you what the car's survived. It's on you to work out what it's about to do next.