What is a car service history?

Everyone has a history

Even cars, unless you bought your car brand new it will have a previous owner or owners and hopefully a full service history. This service history will help you to get the most value from your car whether you continue to drive it or resell it later on.

What is a car full service history?

A Full Service History or FSH for short is simply a book or an electronic recording of the repair and maintenance history of the car, the FSH also holds the paperwork for each repair and makes sure that any work done is completed to the manufacturer’s specification.

Recovering your car service history.

Life has its ups and downs and sometimes those downs come when you lose your FSH or it is destroyed by accident. Don’t lose hope though as it is possible to recover the FSH of your car.

There are 3 methods to do this.

Franchised and independent dealers, if you know their name you can contact them to get of the records they hold for your car. (Some charge for this service)

Ask the DVLA by filling out form V888 to request the names of the cars previous owners, they may still have the FSH in their records or be able to tell you which garage carried out the work.

Modern cars have a computerised FSH held by the manufacturer on their website, this is easily accessible with the registration number and chassis number.

Having an FSH is very important if you do not have one you could lose between 10 and 20% of the value of your car. If the resale value of your car is £10,000 you could lose between £1000 to £2000
That is a hefty price to pay over a small book.

Keeping an accurate vehicle service record is very important, for the seller it is not a good thing to lose the book for the buyer it is money saved. Make sure you have an accurate and up to date FSH so you get your money’s worth when the time comes to replace your car.