Mileage, owners and service records, how to read a car's history
Three numbers appear on every used listing and most buyers weigh them in the wrong order. Low mileage is not automatically good, and a high owner count matters more than almost anything else on the page.
Every listing gives you the same three facts. Age, mileage, number of owners. They look simple enough to compare at a glance, which is exactly why people get them wrong.
Mileage tells you less than you think
The average car here covers somewhere around 15,000 to 20,000km a year. Anything meaningfully above that is high mileage, and anything well below is low mileage. That much is obvious.
What is less obvious is that low mileage is not automatically better.
A car doing 5,000km a year is doing short trips. The engine may rarely reach full operating temperature, which is harder on oil and on the exhaust system than a long steady run. Rubber perishes on a schedule that has nothing to do with distance. Brake discs corrode when a car sits. Batteries fail from lack of use as readily as from overuse.
A car with 60,000km that did steady expressway mileage is often in better mechanical condition than one with 40,000km of school runs.
Work out the yearly rate rather than reading the total. Divide the odometer by the car's age. That single number tells you far more than the raw figure.
What actually matters is whether the mileage is consistent with the service record and the physical condition. A car showing 60,000km with worn pedal rubbers, a shiny steering wheel and a driver's seat bolster that has collapsed is telling you something the odometer is not.
Owner count is the number to weigh most
This is the one people skim past, and it is the most informative figure on the page.
One owner from new is a genuinely strong signal. It usually means the car did what its buyer expected for its whole life, and that there is a single continuous service history rather than a patchwork.
Two or three owners across eight years is normal and means nothing much.
Three owners inside three years is a warning. Cars get passed on quickly for a reason, and the reason is rarely that everyone loved it. An intermittent electrical fault, a gearbox that shudders when cold, something that never quite fails outright but is never right either. Each owner discovers it, decides it is not worth fixing, and moves it on.
Owner count is transfers plus one. A log card showing two transfers means three owners including the current one, and listings do not always make that clear.
Service records are the real document
Mileage can be altered. Owner count is a matter of record but tells you nothing about care. The service history is where the truth sits, and it is the thing most sellers are vaguest about.
What you want to see is regularity. Servicing at roughly the right intervals, from a workshop that can be identified, across the whole life of the car. Whether it was the agent or a decent independent matters far less than whether it happened consistently.
What should concern you is a gap. Two years with nothing recorded means either the car sat unused, or it was serviced somewhere that left no paper trail, or it was not serviced. None of those is good, and the seller usually cannot tell you which.
Ask what has been replaced, not just what has been serviced. Brakes, tyres, battery and suspension components all have finite lives. A car with fresh consumables is worth more than an identical one that is about to need all four, and the difference is usually larger than the price gap between them.
Putting the three together
A car that reads well on all three is straightforward. The interesting cases are the mixed ones.
High mileage, one owner, full records. Often a good buy. Someone drove it a lot and looked after it, and the price reflects the odometer rather than the condition.
Low mileage, three owners, patchy records. Be careful. The low mileage may be why it changed hands so often, because nobody kept it long enough to put distance on it.
Average mileage, two owners, a two year gap in the history. Ask what happened in those two years before anything else.
The questions worth asking
- How many owners, counting the current one.
- When was it last serviced, and where.
- What has been replaced recently, and what is due next.
- Is there a gap in the history, and what happened during it.
A seller who answers all four without hesitating is worth continuing with. The specific answers matter, but so does the willingness to give them.
For what those consumables cost once you own the car, see what a used car actually costs to run for a year.
Looking at something specific?
Send me the car and I will run these numbers on it before you commit to anything.