carVertical Review 2026: The Foreign History a UK Check Leaves Out

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carVertical searches “over a billion verified records” and “over 330 million records” of damage history for one registration or VIN, and its own used-car index puts Britain top of 23 countries on a score of 120.5: of the UK cars it checked, 41.12% carried damage records and 3.98% had a rolled-back odometer. Figures checked 17 October 2026 against carVertical's own pages.

It is a Lithuanian-built service with a British contract. The report is sold under the law of England and Wales, the app has passed a million downloads on Android and was last updated on 24 September 2026, and the company says its information security management system holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification. What it sells that no HPI-licensed British check can is the part of a car's life that happened abroad — and that matters more than it sounds, because 682,375 vehicles were registered in the UK for the first time in the three months to June 2026 alone, and an imported used car's British record starts on the day it is registered here.

One thing to know before you click: carVertical does not publish what a report costs. The pricing page at carvertical.com/gb/pricing rendered three blank placeholders and the word “Loading” on 17 October 2026, the home page was read twice the same day and carried no price at all, and three of the company's own help and blog pages link to the pricing page without naming a figure. The only prices it prints are relative: “Comparing two cars cuts the report cost by 32%. Three is 45%.”

Reports are bought as credits rather than as a single search. Credits last six months, a subscription of 10 or 30 reports a month expires 30 days after purchase, and the free side of the service is a VIN decoder that returns the make, model, year and engine details and nothing historical.

The part of a car's life that stops at the Channel

A British vehicle check is built on British registers. The finance search, the stolen marker, the write-off category and the National Mileage Register readings all begin when a car is first registered here, and the Department for Transport's own definition of an import is exactly that: “vehicles imported into the UK at the point of first UK registration”. There were 682,375 first registrations in the April to June quarter of 2026, inside a licensed fleet of 42.9 million vehicles, on figures published on 23 September 2026.

For a car that spent five years in Germany or the Netherlands before someone shipped it over, that is the whole problem. HMRC gives an importer 14 days to notify the arrival through NOVA, the Notification of Vehicle Arrivals service, and the DVLA will not register the car until that is done — but neither step creates any record of what happened to the vehicle abroad. A UK check on that car can be entirely clean and entirely accurate at the same time.

carVertical is built the other way round. Its report sections include odometer readings, accident and damage history, theft records checked “against theft databases worldwide”, ownership history, a title check for US-registered vehicles, recalls, historical photographs, market value, whether the car was used as a taxi, rental or fleet vehicle, and a timeline of ownership changes, inspections and MOT records. The help centre is careful to say that “not all sections may appear in every carVertical report” and that data access varies by country.

The sharpest evidence that this gap is real comes from the incumbent rather than the challenger. HPI's own guarantee page promises up to £30,000 for inaccurate or incomplete information — and then excludes “the vehicle's descriptive information (including import status), mileage, value”. The British standard-setter will not stand behind import status. That is the ground carVertical is standing on.

The name on the website is not the name on the contract

Clause 1.2 of the UK terms is blunt about it: “carvertical.com is managed and administered by Sovian Epublishing Limited, company number 16582008, address 1 Princeton Mews, 167-169 London Road, Kingston Upon Thames, Surrey, England KT2 6PT (hereinafter – carVertical)”. Everything the terms go on to call “carVertical” is that company.

Companies House has it incorporated on 15 July 2025 — three months before this page was written — as a private limited company under SIC code 82990, “Other business support service activities not elsewhere classified”, with two officers and no resignations: a single director, Rokas Medonis, Lithuanian and resident in Lithuania, and a corporate secretary, M & N Secretaries Limited (03775091). Its first accounts are made up to 31 December 2026 and are not due until 15 April 2027, so there is no turnover figure, no balance sheet and no trading history published anywhere.

The data sits elsewhere. The vehicle data privacy notice, last updated on 18 February 2026, names three joint controllers: UAB “cV Group”, legal entity code 303134915, of Aukštaičių Str. 7, Vilnius; carVertical OÜ, legal entity code 14416655, of Narva mnt. 5, Tallinn; and Sovian Epublishing Limited. The Android app is published by CV GROUP, UAB at the same Vilnius address. Vehicle data “shall be retained for 30 years” from the date carVertical receives it.

Two of those facts are worth more to a buyer than the corporate trivia suggests. The contract is governed by English law, which is better than the alternative for anyone who has to enforce it. And the English company that signs it was formed in July 2025 and has filed nothing beyond a confirmation statement dated 14 July 2026.

Why you cannot find out what it costs before you start buying

On 17 October 2026 the pricing page at carvertical.com/gb/pricing returned a complete page with the pricing block showing the word “Loading” and three dashes where the plans should be. This is not a block: the page opens, the prices are fetched by the browser afterwards. The home page was read twice the same day and carried the claim “Save up to 40% to leave no car unchecked” without a single pound figure beside it, and the company's own articles on free checks, discount codes and outstanding finance all link to the pricing page rather than naming a price.

What the site does publish is the shape of the discount. The discount-code article states that “Comparing two cars cuts the report cost by 32%. Three is 45%”, that genuine codes “tend to sit in the 20 to 30% range”, that partner coupon sites offer “around 20%”, and that the built-in bundle discount “is bigger than most codes you'd find online”. The 45% on three reports and the home page's “up to 40%” do not agree, and neither carries a date.

The mechanics behind the missing number matter as much as the number. A purchase buys credits rather than one search: the help centre says “credits are valid 6 months after purchase”, a business subscription of 10 or 30 reports a month expires 30 days from the purchase date, and an account is created automatically once you have paid. So the cheapest route for a buyer looking at one car and the cheapest route for a buyer comparing three are different products, and the price of neither can be read without entering a checkout.

For context on what that price is being measured against: on the same day, the AA's own page offered “a single comprehensive vehicle history check for just £14.99” or five at “£6 per vehicle”, and HPI's own site offered its full check at £19.99, a Basic Check at £9.99 and a MultiCheck of three for £29.99. A reader who wants to know whether carVertical undercuts any of that has to begin a transaction to find out.

Nobody here is promising you £30,000

The British checks compete on a guarantee, and they print the number on the sales page. The AA's vehicle check page says “We guarantee you up to £30,000 to cover any inaccuracies in your report”, and notes that the checks “are provided by HPI Limited”; HPI's own site shows a “£30,000 guarantee” beside its £19.99 check. HPI's guarantee page sets the maximum at “up to £30,000 (£15,000 for written off vehicles)”, “valid for two years from the date of the check”, covering “reimbursement of financial loss you suffer arising from inaccurate or incomplete information”, with condition data capped at “up to £15,000 or 50% of the market value of the car, whichever is the lower” — and the page itself warns that it “may not be up-to-date with current terms”.

carVertical publishes no equivalent. The terms define a Report as “a digital publication (e-publication) that provides an analytical summary of a vehicle's history”, warn at clause 4.6.2 that “the information provided in the Report may not always accurately reflect all the facts of the vehicle” and at 4.6.5 that it “should not be the sole basis for making a decision to purchase or refuse to purchase a vehicle”, and then deal with the consequences of being wrong in a single line each: clause 10.1 says liability “is determined in accordance with applicable legal acts”, and clause 10.2 says that if the information “does not correspond to reality”, liability “is assessed in accordance with applicable law”. No sum, no cap, no claims process.

What is published instead is a return of the report. A check that comes back with no mileage records, no damage records and no timeline events is a “no-findings report”, and the system “will automatically add an unused report to your account”, live for six months. Anything else has to be asked for: email support with the VIN, the purchase date and an explanation, “within 30 days of generating the report”, after which “requests submitted after this period will not be accepted”. The remedy for a report that was wrong is another report.

Set against the British alternative, that is the trade. One side pays out money it has promised in advance on a narrow set of facts and excludes import status; the other searches wider, promises nothing in writing and hands back a credit.

The 14-day right dies the moment the report opens, and the law has a condition attached

Clause 7.1 of the UK terms gives the ordinary distance-selling right: a buyer may “without giving a reason, cancel such purchase within 14 days”, with money back “no later than within 14 days from the date of receipt” of the notice. Clause 7.2 then removes it for anything used — “the Right of Withdrawal does not apply to used Reports”, “as the service is considered to be fully provided at the time of vehicle history report generation” — while unused reports in a package keep the 14 days and part-cancelled packages are refunded proportionally.

That is a recognised position in UK law, with a condition on it that the terms do not spell out. Regulation 37 of the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 is headed “Supply of digital content in cancellation period”, and it says a trader “must not begin supply of the digital content before the end of the cancellation period” unless the consumer has given express consent and acknowledged that the right to cancel will be lost. Regulation 37(4) then says the consumer bears no cost at all for content supplied where that consent was not given, or was given without the acknowledgement.

So the clause stands or falls on what the checkout asks you to tick, and the checkout is behind the payment page that also hides the price. Worth reading the box carefully before you confirm — the right exists until you knowingly give it up, and the words “you will lose your right to cancel” are the ones that do it.

Four counts of its own sources, and one rollback figure in two units

Read enough of carVertical's pages and the same quantity comes out differently each time. The UK home page says the search is “verified against 1000+ trusted sources across 45 countries” and that the company is “trusted by 6,000,000+ people across 37 countries”, with a second line on the same page putting it at “4.5+ million people”. The help centre says “over 900 trusted sources” on one article and “over 1000 trusted sources worldwide” searching “across 40+ countries” on another. The page explaining who owns the data says “hundreds of third-party sources”. The leasing page claims “1 000+” sources, “2 000 000+” unique users a year, and both “37 countries” and “38” markets in the same screen.

The mileage claim is the one that actually changes a figure a reader might use. The UK home page says a rolled-back odometer here is “off by around 35,000 miles on average”. The company's own transparency index for the United Kingdom gives the average rollback as “35,147 km”, which is about 21,840 miles. Both are carVertical's numbers, the digits are the same and the units are not, and nothing on either page is dated in a way that settles which is current. The same index page is served with a title reading “UK Used Car Market Transparency Index 2024” while its year selector shows 2026, and its methodology describes 12 months of report data running October to September without naming the sample size.

The index itself will not tell you which way its own number points. Its methodology says the “Market Transparency Index measures the level of potentially hidden or false information provided to a customer when buying a used car”, which makes the UK's 120.5 — the highest of the 23 countries listed — the worst result on the board; the page's own headline and description present first place as Britain being transparent. The page never reconciles the two, and it does not publish how the six weighted factors behind the score are combined, so the sub-rankings are the only part a reader can use directly: 7th of 23 on damaged cars, 13th on clocked odometers, 20th on average damage value and 1st on the size of the average rollback.

The damage figures sit in the same position: “around £2,100 per record” on the UK home page against an “average damage value” of €5,621 on the index. Those may well be measuring different things — a record against a vehicle — but neither page says so, and the counters further down the home page for cars checked, clocked vehicles found and damaged vehicles detected did not render at all on either read.

There is no regulator behind any of this, and the dispute route is unnamed

A vehicle history report is a data product, not a financial service. There is no FCA permission to look up, no Financial Ombudsman line, no claims-acceptance statistic and no ratings agency scoring the sector. That is true of every provider in this category, and it is the reason the paperwork each one publishes is the only thing a buyer can actually test.

carVertical's own escalation route is thin. Inaccuracies are reported “by filling out a special report form” at carvertical.com/gb/contacts, after which “carVertical will take reasonable steps to verify the information”. Clause 12.1 sends disputes to negotiation and then to “a competent court in accordance with the provisions of the applicable law”, and clause 12.3 says a UK-resident user may “contact an accredited Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) provider” — without naming one, which is a difficulty, because approved ADR schemes are sector-specific and no provider is signed up to hear complaints about vehicle data reports. The vehicle data privacy notice mentions “the right to lodge a complaint with the data protection supervisory authority” and does not name the Information Commissioner's Office either.

The security claim has the same shape. The information security policy states that the group holds “ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification” covering “all information technology products and related projects in the UAB ‘CV Group’ and carVertical OÜ”, and names no certification body, no certificate number and no expiry date. The claim is probably sound and it is entirely unverifiable from the page that makes it — which is a shame, because an external audit is a better argument than any of the marketing copy around it.

One practical consequence of the missing price: Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 only makes a card issuer jointly liable where the cash price is more than £100, so a cheap report almost certainly falls below it. A chargeback through the card scheme, or the county court for sums up to £10,000, is what is left.

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.