CarExamer Review: £142.99 Mobile Inspections and Who Actually Does Them

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CarExamer sends a mechanic to the car instead of asking you to drive the car to a garage. A Basic pre-purchase inspection is £142.99 including VAT and buys 100-plus checks, up to 70 minutes on site, a road test of up to 10 minutes and a photographic report five hours after the inspector starts work. Three larger packages follow at £189.99, £256.99 and £276.99, and booking two cars at one address takes 10% off, rising to 20% on five.

The independence behind that is real, and it is the whole point of paying for an inspection. CarExamer Ltd does not employ the mechanic and does not carry out the inspection itself. Its own customer terms say so in plain words: “CarExamer does not provide vehicle inspections – we help to connect customers and inspectors”, and “You buy a vehicle inspection from the inspector who accepts your booking – not from CarExamer.” Nobody in that chain is also trying to sell you the car. It does decide who you are dealing with if the report turns out to be wrong, and that sits further down this page.

Two things worth knowing before you book. The Basic package assumes you have already seen the car in person, is aimed at a newer, lower-mileage vehicle, and does not raise it off the ground at all. And the seller has to agree to the visit in advance — confirming they are the registered keeper, consenting to the inspection, providing “a safe and accessible location” and handing over the keys, the V5C and the MOT certificate. A private seller who will not do that ends the booking before it starts.

Four packages, and the clock is the thing that changes

The price list is published in full, including VAT, which is more than one of the two national names manages. Basic, from £142.99, allows up to 70 minutes and runs 100-plus checks with a documentation check, a VIN check, a battery test, a diagnostic scan and a road test of up to 10 minutes — and only “when the vehicle is safe, road legal and available to drive”. The car stays on the ground. Standard, from £189.99, doubles the time to 120 minutes, raises the vehicle, runs 200-plus checks, adds a scratch report and a follow-up call with the inspector. Premium, from £256.99, takes three hours, runs 300-plus checks and adds paint thickness readings, accident-damage checks and video feedback. All three promise the report within five hours of the inspector arriving.

The fourth is different in kind. The Engineer's Report, from £276.99, is bought when something has already gone wrong: you supply a statement of the problem in the booking notes, the engineer examines that specific concern, and the report lands in 48 hours rather than five. The engineer will not dismantle anything, a revisit costs extra, and the escalation prices are published — £500 for court attendance, and where a full expert witness is needed, “from £1000 + £300 question round and £500 court attendance fee”. Very few firms in this trade print what a dispute costs before you are in one.

Read the ladder against the clock rather than against the check counts. Premium costs 1.8 times Basic and claims three times the checks, but it buys 2.6 times the inspector's time, and time on site is the part a reader can actually picture. The 300-plus figure is also the gap between the headline and the published checklist: CarExamer's own Premium list details 21 road-test items and 26 electrical-control items, with the rest of the count unitemised.

The contract is with the mechanic, and 35% of it never reaches him

This is the fact that separates CarExamer from an inspection bought from a motoring organisation, and it runs through every document on the site. The inspector terms say the inspector works “as principal on his own account” and that nothing in the agreement makes him an “employee, worker, agent or partner of CarExamer”. The customer terms say the inspection is bought from him, not from the platform. And the money follows that structure: Commission is defined as “35% of the Inspection Fee”, and on completion the payment gateway “shall transfer the Commission to CarExamer” and “transfer the balance of the Inspection Fee to the Inspector”.

That is a normal marketplace arrangement and there is nothing hidden about it — it is printed in the terms anyone can open. It is worth doing the sum, though, because CarExamer's recruitment page advertises that an inspector “could be earning up to £90 an hour!” On the published numbers, a Basic job at £142.99 leaves £50.05 with the platform and £92.94 with the inspector, which over 70 minutes is £79.66 an hour before any travel to the car, the diagnostic equipment he has to own or the insurance he has to carry. A Premium job at £256.99 leaves him £167.04 for three hours, or £55.68 an hour. Those three divisions are ours, not CarExamer's, but the inputs are all the company's own published figures. The advertising-standards guidance on a “from” or “up to” claim asks for a significant proportion of people to reach the advertised figure, and no proportion is published here.

The structure also decides who answers for a bad report. The inspector terms require him to indemnify CarExamer against “any negligent or reckless act, omission or default in the provision of the Vehicle Inspections”, and state that CarExamer is not liable for “any act, omission, negligence or other misconduct by the Inspector”. The customer terms put the same thing from the buyer's side: “Our sole liability relates to the provision of the CarExamer Platform to you.” The platform sells the booking. The mechanic sells the opinion.

Five years in the trade and a Level 2 certificate

CarExamer publishes its entry bar, which is unusual and useful. Its support pages say “All car inspectors are vetted to a high standard”, that it checks “the qualifications and experience of independent inspectors before they accept bookings”, and that an inspector must be a professional mechanic with at least five years' trade experience, must “Have a minimum level 2 or higher qualification or accreditation in Light Vehicle Maintenance or Repair” and must “Have liability and trade insurance”. The inspector terms define those policies precisely: commercial general liability, professional indemnity and public liability cover.

Set the qualification against the government's own scale and you can see what the floor is. GOV.UK lists a Level 2 qualification alongside “GCSE - grades 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4”, an “intermediate apprenticeship” and a “level 2 NVQ”. Level 3 is where A levels, advanced apprenticeships and Level 3 NVQs sit. So the minimum is the entry-level motor trade qualification, topped up by the five-year experience requirement, which is the part doing most of the work. The firm's own wording allows “qualification or accreditation”, and does not say which accreditations count.

One mismatch is worth flagging because it runs the other way. The recruitment page, which is where an applicant actually starts, lists the equipment an inspector needs and asks about experience, but does not mention insurance at all — while the inspector terms make three separate policies a condition of working. The requirement is real; the page that recruits against it leaves it out.

97.4% of the cars it looked at had something adverse on them

CarExamer publishes a Car Market Health Index built from its own completed inspections, and it is the most interesting thing on the site. The series starts at 100.0 in 2019 and the latest reading, for a partial 2026, is 64.3 — described on the page as “the lowest recorded in the series”, 35.7 points below the baseline. It is drawn from 2,767 vehicles and 392,822 assessed checklist items, which works out at about 142 recorded checks per car.

The number a buyer should take from it is the one labelled “Vehicles with adverse items”: 97.4% for 2026. On CarExamer's own sample, very nearly every used car inspected had at least one thing recorded against it. The page is careful about what that means — “These findings describe the cars we inspected, rather than every used car in the UK” — and that caveat matters, because people commission an inspection when they are already uneasy. The page also shows an 8.5% adverse rate for the same year without defining how the two percentages relate, and no explanation appears anywhere on it. The second figure is presumably the share of individual checklist items failing rather than the share of cars, but CarExamer does not say so, and a published index should define its own measures.

For outside context, Citizens Advice said on 20 May 2024 that its consumer service had handled “almost 43,000 complaints relating to used cars in 2023 alone”, and that 3.5 million people (15%) were then looking to buy one. Its chief executive, Dame Clare Moriarty, put it as: “Year after year problems with used cars top the charts of consumer issues our expert advisers help with.” That is the market a £142.99 inspection is sold into.

A road test counted in minutes cannot be set beside one counted in miles

The two national providers both quote the road test as a distance — the AA stops at 10 miles at every tier on its own pages, and the RAC publishes 3, 10 and 20 miles by package. CarExamer quotes 10 minutes on Basic and 15 minutes on Standard and Premium. Ten minutes on a dual carriageway and ten minutes through a town are not the same test, and neither converts into the other provider's number, so the one specification this trade genuinely competes on cannot be compared across the three of them.

The same problem applies to the check counts, in every direction. CarExamer's 100-plus, 200-plus and 300-plus sit against the AA's 98, 214 and 221 and the RAC's 307, all of them published by the firms themselves, and none of them counted to a shared definition. A “check” is whatever each provider decides to list separately. The durations are the honest comparator CarExamer has given the market, and it would lose nothing by printing a mileage alongside them.

On price the picture is clearer. The AA's entry inspection is £110 and the RAC's starts at £132, both below CarExamer's £142.99 — but both of those are national organisations with age limits a 15-year-old car will not clear, and CarExamer sets no published age ceiling beyond a suitability note on the Basic package. For an older car, the comparison moves in CarExamer's favour before anyone mentions price.

What the report says about itself before you read a word of it

CarExamer publishes a guidance note that accompanies every report, and it is unusually blunt. The inspection is “visual and external”, “no dismantling, removal or inspection of any parts has been undertaken”, and “this report in no way constitutes any form of guarantee or warranty”, nor “a guarantee against defects arising in the future”. The customer terms add that “Reports are non-forensic and do not certify the vehicle's originality, authenticity or provenance” and that “all measurements in report's are approximate and based on the inspector's professional judgement”. The seller disclaimer confirms that the inspector “will not remove or tamper with any mechanical components of the Vehicle, including road wheels”.

None of that is a scandal. It is what a two- or three-hour non-invasive inspection can honestly promise, and saying it up front is better than burying it. Two scope questions are worth asking at booking, though. The guidance calls the inspection “visual and external” while the Standard and Premium packages raise the vehicle and include a diagnostic scan and paint thickness readings, which are neither purely visual nor purely external; the two descriptions can be reconciled, but only the inspector can tell you where the line falls on your car. And with the wheels staying on, nobody is looking directly at brake pads, discs or the inner faces of the tyres on any package at any price.

The free tools sitting alongside the paid ones are worth a sentence. CarExamer runs a free MOT history lookup, a free car data check and a vehicle recall check, and the MOT page describes its source only as “Official MOT records”, naming neither the DVSA nor the DVLA. The government publishes the same MOT history free on its own service, so the lookup is a convenience rather than a product. The paid history check is honest about its own limits: asked whether it guarantees a car is safe to buy, the page answers “No”, and says it “cannot confirm the car's current mechanical, electrical, structural or cosmetic condition”.

Four hours to cancel, £60 if you miss it, and three accounts of when you pay

The cancellation ladder is short and it is stricter than a distance-selling consumer would expect. You may cancel “without charge when giving a minimum of 4 hours' notice”; inside that, CarExamer “reserve[s] the right to make a late cancellation charge of £60 on behalf of the Inspector”; and in the final two hours there is no cancellation right at all, with “the full inspection fee” payable. A buyer who books the night before a Saturday viewing and has the car sold from under them at 8am is inside the £60 band before the working day starts.

A service bought at a distance normally carries a 14-day cancellation right under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. Where the customer asks for the service to begin inside that window, regulation 36 lets the trader charge a proportionate amount for what has actually been supplied up to the moment of cancellation — which is not obviously the same thing as a flat £60 on a £142.99 booking where no inspector has yet left home. CarExamer's terms make no reference to the 2013 Regulations anywhere. Ask for the statutory position in writing before you accept the charge.

Payment is described three different ways across three of the company's own pages, and they do not all say the same thing. The home page says “you only pay when the inspection is complete” and, a few lines later in its own FAQ, that “Payment is authorised when you book”. The support article says “we will reserve the booking amount on your card on the day of inspection” and “You will only be charged after the inspection is completed”. The customer terms say “you will not be charged until the Vehicle Inspection has been completed”. An authorisation is not a charge, so these can be squared — but they put the hold on your card at booking, on the morning of the inspection and nowhere at all, depending on which page you read, and the money is ring-fenced on your card either way.

No ombudsman, and the initials in the small print are not spelled out

If the report is wrong, the route is set out in the customer terms and it ends in the courts. You “contact the Inspector through our online resolution centre”, and if the matter is unresolved “within 30 days” the terms move to a further examination by “an appropriate body who will be a member of” “I.A.E.A”. The ceiling is set in the same clause: “Max inspectors liability in dispute is fee you have paid for inspection booking” — £142.99 on a Basic job. Where extra history data was bought, the claim limit is the price paid for that data. Clause 13.6 puts disputes under “the exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts”, and no ombudsman or alternative dispute resolution scheme is named anywhere on the site. A vehicle inspection is not a regulated financial service, so there is no Financial Ombudsman behind it either.

The initials are worth unpicking, because the terms never expand them. The automotive body of that name is The Institute of Automotive Engineer Assessors, a registered charity since 5 May 1977 with 13 trustees, gross income of £312.64k and expenditure of £181.70k in the year to 31 December 2024, whose objects run to “the science of their repair; and to further public education therein”. The same three letters belong to an unrelated international body in educational assessment, so a customer searching the abbreviation in the terms will land in the wrong place. One sentence giving the full name would fix it. Note also what the clause does and does not do: a re-examination by an independent engineer settles the technical question, it is not an adjudication, and it does not lift the cap on what the inspector can be made to pay.

The liability cap itself is not outrageous — the RAC's own terms cap at the inspection fee too, and section 57 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 stops a trader excluding liability for a service performed without reasonable care and skill, which puts the price paid on the floor rather than the ceiling of what a court could award. What differs here is who is behind it. At a motoring organisation the cap sits in front of a company with a balance sheet; here it sits in front of a self-employed mechanic and his professional indemnity policy, and CarExamer's own liability stops at the platform.

The law stops at the dealership gate, which is why this product exists

The strongest argument for paying £142.99 to look at a stranger's car has nothing to do with CarExamer. Buy from a trader and the Consumer Rights Act 2015 gives you goods of satisfactory quality and a short-term right to reject. Buy privately and almost none of that applies: section 14 of the Sale of Goods Act 1979 implies a term of satisfactory quality only “Where the seller sells goods in the course of a business”, and opens with the words “Except as provided by this section and section 15 below”. A private seller must describe the car accurately and must own it. They owe you nothing whatever about its condition.

That is the gap an inspection fills, and it is why the arithmetic works even at the top of the range. The Premium package at £256.99 is about 5% of what Citizens Advice puts as a typical used-car spend, and CarExamer's own index says 97.4% of the cars it looked at had something recorded against them. Against a private sale with no quality term behind it, the fee is cheap insurance against the wrong car; against a franchised dealer's used-car warranty it is a second opinion you are paying for twice.

Two structural points to finish on. CarExamer also sells inspections to the other side of the deal — “CarExamer Trusted” offers dealerships “independent inspection evidence” for their own stock — so a report produced for a seller is not the same thing as one you commissioned to your own specification. And it sells a £99 online inspection course (or £299 for a one-to-one session), which it says is part of onboarding for licence and franchise applicants while stating plainly that “Completing it does not by itself guarantee an inspector role, licence or franchise approval”. A firm that trains inspectors, recruits inspectors, franchises inspectors and takes 35% of what they are paid is a platform business first and an inspection business second, and reading its documents in that order makes all of them easier to understand.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 17 October 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.