Helping UK car buyers make smarter decisions
Buying a used car in the UK shouldn’t feel like a gamble. Yet thousands of people get caught out every year, sometimes by clocked mileage, sometimes by cars with a long history of MOT failures, sometimes by vehicles that look fine until you actually check the paperwork.
The data to spot these things has always existed, buried in millions of MOT test records nobody outside the trade ever sees. PlateInsight was built to change that.
We take the raw data and use it to surface the things that matter: how reliable a specific car is, whether its mileage looks plausible, what defects keep coming up, and how the car stacks up against thousands of others like it.
I'm Mike H, founder and director of Vehicle Analytics Ltd, which builds PlateInsight. I've spent 20 years working in analytics across retail, e-commerce and financial services, and used cars always struck me as the market where that kind of thinking would help buyers the most. The DVSA publishes a huge MOT dataset under an open licence, and outside the trade barely anyone reads it properly. So we do. On top of that we pull in DVLA registration records, current-market valuations and a handful of other trusted automotive sources, so you can check any car against its full recorded history before you decide.
Vehicle Analytics Ltd is registered in England & Wales as company 17062416. You can verify the company and my listing as director on Companies House →
Everything in PlateInsight is built on real data from trusted sources. We don’t use owner surveys, anecdotal reports or the kind of soft signals other reliability rankings rely on.
The DVSA is the UK government agency responsible for MOT testing. Their open dataset contains the full record of every MOT test conducted at an authorised station across the UK, including pass and fail results, advisory notices, dangerous defects, and recorded mileage at each test.
The DVLA maintains the register of all vehicles licensed to drive on UK roads. We use DVLA data for vehicle specifications, tax status, V5C registration details, and first registration dates.
We supplement government data with trusted third-party automotive data providers for market valuations, specification details, and vehicle identification.
Raw data isn’t much use to a buyer on its own. PlateInsight does the analysis for you and turns those millions of records into a few clear answers:
For a detailed explanation of how we calculate reliability scores, see our methodology page.
PlateInsight is available on iOS and Android.
Beyond individual vehicle checks, we publish free guides on reliability rankings, best and worst model years, and used-car buying advice. All of it is built from the same MOT dataset that powers the app.
5 free credits when you download. No subscription required.