Has this car been in an accident? Check by VIN.

Start with the VIN. The free decode confirms the exact vehicle — checksum-verified, resolved to the trim the car actually is — so you know the record you're about to read belongs to the car in front of you. The full history report ($19.99) then shows any reported accidents and damage: collision records, title brands like salvage, flood, and junk, and total-loss events, each with its source and timestamp. If none are on file, the report states that outcome — a clean record is a result you can read, not an empty space you have to guess about.

What "accident and damage" covers on the record

Damage reaches a vehicle history record through several distinct channels, and the report keeps them separate because they mean different things:

• Reported accidents — collision events entered into the record from the cascade of sources the report draws on, each dated so a single fender-bender reads differently from a pattern of repairs.
• Title brands — the legal marks a titling authority stamps when a car crosses a threshold. Salvage means an insurer declared it a loss; flood means water damage of record; junk means it was designated for dismantling. A brand is a permanent fact on the title, and it reads here plainly whenever the record carries it.
• Total-loss events — the moment an insurer decided the car wasn't worth repairing, which may or may not have led to a branded title depending on the state and what happened next.

Each of these is shown as a value with its source and its timestamp, drawn from a multi-source cascade rather than a single feed, so the sequence — what happened, and in what order — is legible instead of collapsed into a yes/no.

The rule that makes the answer trustworthy: a clean record is stated

The hardest thing to get right about an accident check is the negative result, and it's where most reports quietly fail. On this record, a dash means a value is withheld pending payment — it never means a fact is missing. And when the collision, brand, and total-loss categories genuinely hold no events, the report says so outright. It does not leave you staring at a blank section, hoping the silence means the car is clean. Zero is stated, not celebrated, and never implied. This is the record's discipline, stated or absent: the report will never imply a clean history it can't attest, and it will never let an absence of data masquerade as an absence of accidents.

That matters because "no record" and "no accident" are not the same claim. A car can have a spotless record because nothing ever happened to it, or because the event never reached a reporting source. An honest report distinguishes those cases by showing you what was checked and when — the source and the timestamp behind the clean result — so you can weigh the answer instead of taking it on faith. Where a fact hasn't cleared verification, it says "Reported, not yet verified" rather than presenting itself as confirmed.

What the free check settles before you pay

You don't pay to find out whether to look. The free rung, on every VIN, checksum-verifies the number, decodes the vehicle, runs an open-recall check against the federal register (NHTSA) with remedy status, and gives you the record's structural count — how many records exist across how many categories. That count is the record's anatomy, not its contents: it tells you a damage history exists to be read, without handing you the details for free. If the structural count shows title or collision categories with entries, that's your signal the $19.99 report will have something in it. Free faces lead; the report is the deepening step you take once the free rung tells you it's worth taking.

Both sides read the same page

Every report lives at its own address, vhr.vin/{VIN}, and the seller sees the exact page you see — same accident records, same title brands, same timestamps. An accident history isn't something one party gets to know and the other has to discover after the deposit. If you're buying, that turns a suspected rebuild into a shared fact you can price against. If you're selling a clean car, it lets you prove the absence of damage on the record instead of asking a stranger to believe you. And if the VIN was pulled recently, the report is $9.99 — the cached price, with the pull's timestamp shown beside it, so you can judge how current the answer is. The same class of report lists at $44.99 at Carfax and $29.99 at AutoCheck — the providers' own published list prices as of mid-2026; here it's $19.99, one payment, no subscription. The check digit certifies the VIN; it never sells you the car.

For machines, the same record returns as typed JSON via Accept negotiation, and the paid report is a typed offer at the posted price through one MCP server, apis.vin/mcp.

Keep reading the car

• values.vin — what the damage did to the number: five market values for the VIN, each with source and timestamp, so a branded title reads against real comps.
• sticker.vin — the original window sticker, the car as it was built, so post-accident changes show as deltas from the factory spec.

Read the full record at vhr.vin — paste the VIN, read the accident history, then decide.