BumBoo

Reads the plate or VIN off a used-vehicle advert and pulls the official record: MOT (UK), APK (NL), recalls (US), and 12 more.

Checking what a used vehicle has actually been through means leaving the advert, finding the right government service, and typing in an identifier the seller may not have written down. BumBoo does it on the page. Open a vehicle advert and a panel appears. It finds the vehicle's identifier - the registration, the kenteken, or the VIN, depending on where you are - reads the country's own public register, and lays out what it holds. WHERE IT WORKS • United Kingdom - the full DVSA MOT history from GOV.UK. On Auto Trader, where the registration is never published, the plate is read from the advert's own photographs on your computer. • Netherlands - the APK expiry date and every defect an inspection station has recorded, from RDW's open data. • United States - the VIN decoded, plus every safety recall and owner complaint NHTSA holds for that model. There is no national roadworthiness test, so there is no inspection history to show, and the panel says so rather than pretending otherwise. • Australia - the VIN decoded, and links to the official checks. No Australian register publishes vehicle records, and the panel tells you that instead of leaving you guessing. • The rest of Europe - Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, Poland, Austria, Portugal, Sweden and Denmark. No register outside the Netherlands publishes a vehicle's history to anything that can look it up, so BumBoo does not pretend one does. What it does instead is read the advert properly - the real price with VAT at that country's rate, the gearbox, what the finance offer actually costs, how far away it is - and name the official check that does exist, from HistoVec in France to Car-Pass in Belgium and Fordonsfråga in Sweden. WHAT YOU GET Where a country runs a periodic test: • Every MOT test, pass or fail, with mileage and the exact defects recorded • A mileage chart across the vehicle's whole history - a clock that went backwards shows as a dip • Recurring faults: the same defect appearing test after test, never properly fixed • Corrosion and structural findings, called out separately • Gaps in testing, and years where the vehicle barely moved • Whether the advert's own claims match the official record - including an advertised mileage lower than the last recorded reading Where it does not: • Every safety recall issued against the model, grouped by what was recalled, with the ones NHTSA says not to park indoors called out first • What owners keep reporting to the regulator about that model year • The vehicle as it was actually built - body, engine, drive, plant - to check against what the advert claims IT CHECKS ITS OWN WORK Reading a plate from a photograph is imperfect: V looks like Y, B looks like R. The trouble is that a misread plate is often a real registration belonging to somebody else's car, so a careless tool will confidently show you the wrong vehicle's history. BumBoo never trusts the plate on its own. It looks the candidate up, then compares make, model, colour, fuel and year against the advert in front of you. If they disagree, it tries the next reading - including single-character corrections - until the record actually matches the vehicle being sold. The panel tells you plainly whether it confirmed the match, and shows you the plate it settled on. If it cannot be sure, it says so and lets you type the plate yourself, rather than guessing. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Plate reading happens on your machine, using an OCR engine bundled inside the extension. No photograph is ever uploaded. There is no account, no analytics, no tracking, and no server belonging to the developer. The identifier you are checking goes to that country's public register and nowhere else. FREE, AND NOTHING TO SET UP Every register it reads is a free public one - GOV.UK, RDW, NHTSA - and none of them needs an account or a key. Open an advert and it works. MOT and vehicle data are published by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency under the Open Government Licence v3.0; Dutch vehicle data by RDW as open data; American vehicle, recall and complaint data by NHTSA. BumBoo is an independent tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them, or by any advert site it reads. Always confirm a vehicle's history and condition yourself before buying.