(Found this while lurking through various car web sites...) Go to this link, pick up all the approrpiate cookies, and then follow the link to CarFAX. It's allegedly only valid until 5pm (US-Eastern) today. On my own car (with its lovely history), I see that the only things CarFAX knows about are when the car was sold, when it was titled to me, and the two times it's had its emission test.

So... when you trade in a car to a dealer, how much information are you required to tell that dealer? Are they going to want your full service records? CarFAX clearly doesn't have much for them to see.

Awesome. Thanks for the link.

Can you do me a favor and put some sort of delimiter before your signature? I end up reading it almost every time you make a post.

My wife works for Carfax. What they have depends mostly on the particular state. Different states have different requirements for what has to be reported. My wife's car had a legitimate odometer rollback (instrument cluster had to be replaced under warrenty). That didn't even show up on the report because Virginia is one of the states that records the least amount of information. I'm sure when the car is retitled it will get recorded but the dealer wasn't required to report it.

You do get to see all of a car's owners and whether it was declared a total insurance loss and salvaged. I think you can also see if the car was bought back by the dealer/maker as a lemon. This is useful information but don't expect to get detailed service records.

Let's put it this way: the vast bulk of Carfax's revenue comes from used car dealers. They don't want information that makes the car harder to sell. They want to show buyers that the car is legal but service records that detailed every little problem would only cause buyers to ask questions.

-Dylan