I read what the car's computers know. Before you pay for it.

A $75 deposit (or full payment, your choice) locks your booking and comes off the total. The balance is due on completion, at the car: tap your card on my phone or send an Interac e-Transfer. You get an HST receipt either way.

On completion. I walk you through the findings at the car, and the PDF lands in your inbox before I drive away. A printed copy handed over on-site is +$5, and you can decide that on the day.

Anything the car's sensors don't see: rust, frame damage, bodywork, paint, and mechanical wear that hasn't set a code. And there's no accident database inside the car: a clean crash-event memory is good evidence, not proof. That's why I offer the CarFax Canada report as an add-on and tell you when a physical inspection is worth pairing with the scan.

Yes, two ways. A rollback rewrites the number stored in the instrument cluster's memory chip. A mileage blocker (a plug-in "CAN filter" or "km-stopper") taps the car's data bus and freezes the odometer so it never counts up while the car is driven. Both are sold openly online, marketed for German cars, and both are illegal to use in a sale. In Ontario, odometer tampering is an offence under the federal Weights and Measures Act and the Consumer Protection Act: one North York dealer was sentenced to 450 days in jail for winding vehicles back by up to 150,000 km.

Often, and I'll be straight about the limits. Most rollbacks only change the dashboard, leaving the engine ECU, ABS, ignition switch and even the keys still holding the true, higher mileage, so a multi-module scan catches that quickly. That's the majority of rollbacks. What a scan does not reliably catch: a mileage blocker (it freezes every module in sync, so there's no mismatch to find) or a professional job that rewrites every module to the same low figure. Even then there are tells I look for: engine running-hours and ignition cycles keep counting even when distance is frozen, so a car showing low kilometres but high engine hours does not add up, and old stored fault codes carry a freeze-frame odometer stamp from when they were logged. And the in-car service log (Mercedes ASSYST, BMW CBS) is dated and stamped with kilometres, so a service recorded at a higher reading than the dash shows now is proof on its own. Bottom line: a clean scan rules out the lazy fakes, it does not certify the mileage, so I always tell you to cross-check the independent service and registry history, which sits outside the car where no tool can reach.

No. A history report only shows what a shop chose to report to it. Cash-paid bodywork and repairs at the many shops that don't report leave no trace, even frame work, and CarFax states it does not guarantee the odometer. A clean report lowers your risk, it isn't proof, which is exactly why a hands-on scan plus a physical look are worth pairing with it.

Often, yes. Clearing fault codes resets the emissions readiness monitors to "not ready" and zeroes the "distance since codes cleared" counter. On a car that has obviously done thousands of kilometres, monitors reading not-ready plus a near-zero distance-since-cleared is a classic sign someone wiped a warning light right before listing it. It isn't foolproof (drive far enough after clearing and the monitors re-complete), but it reliably catches the rushed pre-sale wipe, and a car with every code freshly erased is itself worth a second look.

Sometimes, and I'm careful how I put it. When an impact is severe enough, the airbag/SRS module stores a crash event and often locks itself, and a factory scan reads that, which a generic dongle usually can't. But a scan is a red-flag detector, not a clearance: low-speed knocks and bodywork-only damage store nothing, and crash data can be reset or the module swapped, which is its own small industry. A clean airbag scan lowers your risk, it never proves the car was never hit. That's what a paint-thickness gauge, a physical look and the CarFax add-on are for.

It happens with Marketplace deals. If I can't access the car through no fault of yours, you get everything back except the travel. Cancel or reschedule more than 24 hours out and anything you've paid is fully refunded or moved. Inside 24 hours, the deposit is kept as credit toward one rebooking. Weather reschedules are always free.

A generic dongle talks to one module, the engine, and reads generic emissions codes. It can't reach the other 30-plus control units, can't read airbag crash-event memory, can't cross-check mileage across modules, can't read battery state of health or transmission adaptation values, and can't pull the in-car service history. The factory platforms the dealer uses (Xentry for Mercedes, ISTA for BMW, ODIS for VW and Audi) do all of that. That gap is the whole service.

Factory-level coverage for Mercedes-Benz & Smart (2005 to 2025) including Sprinter, BMW & Mini (2004 to 2024), and VW, Audi, Škoda, SEAT (2001 to 2023). Older or newer than that, use the checker above or just ask: it's often still possible.