Best VIN check in Romania 2026: 5 services ranked

Every service here runs broadly the same essential checks: recorded odometer readings, damage history, and a registration or import trail. What actually differs between them is how much of a Romanian car's life each one covers, how much you see before paying, and whether the price is stated up front or only appears once you reach checkout.

MrVIN publishes this page and ranks itself first, so treat that placement as a claim you can check in ten minutes rather than a verdict to take on trust. Open the sample reports, run a free preview on a real VIN, and compare what each service actually shows before anyone asks you to pay.

CARFAX, the best known name in vehicle history in North America, does not publish a Romanian version of its site, so it sits outside this ranking, though it can still be worth a separate look for a car with genuine American history, since that is where its own records run deepest.

autoDNA, Automoli and RAR publish a single price in lei, MrVIN shows its price on the page before you type a VIN, and carVertical shows its price only at checkout. MrVIN's price is shown excluding VAT, while autoDNA and Automoli include it, so compare checkout totals rather than the headline numbers. Nothing on this page has been converted between currencies: every price is shown the way the service itself displays it, with the date we checked it.

Legea nr. 142/2023 created Romania's electronic register of vehicle history, and Ordinul 210/2024 put it into practice from 1 February 2024. Auto-Pass is RAR's own certificate built on that register for a car registered in Romania, and it draws on four separate kinds of source rather than one.

For a car that has never left Romania, a complete Auto-Pass file with a consistent mileage sequence across all four source types above is about as strong evidence of an honest odometer as a single document can give. It is worth pairing with the two free checks above before treating any of it as the final word.

548,612 vehicles were registered in Romania in 2025, and 71.47% of them, about 392,000, were second hand, according to DGPCI data analysed by Plus Auto. Second hand is not a side category of Romania's car market, it is most of it.

In July 2026 the administrator of an independent ITP station in Brăila, quoted by AGERPRES, estimated from years of inspections that around 60% of cars brought in from abroad have had their mileage altered. That is one inspector's estimate rather than a measured count, and it is worth reading it that way, but it lines up with why kilometraj dat înapoi is a phrase most Romanian buyers already know without needing it explained.

• Serie de șasiu the Romanian term for the VIN, the number stamped into the car itself.
• Istoric auto vehicle history, the phrase most buyers actually search for.
• Kilometraj dat înapoi odometer rollback, the market's best known risk.
• ITP the periodic technical inspection, one of the sources feeding Auto-Pass.
• RCA the mandatory third party motor insurance, checked for free through AIDA.
• CIV cartea de identitate a vehiculului, the vehicle's identity document.

None of that makes an imported car something to avoid on its own. It makes the mileage stored in the car's own electronics, compared against the number on the dashboard, one of the most useful checks available on a used car in Romania today, whatever the paperwork says.

Auto-Pass and DGPCI are both keyed to the Romanian registration. A car that spent eight years in Germany or Italy before it was ever registered in Romania has its life split across systems that were never built to talk to each other, and the border crossing is exactly where mileage readings and damage records tend to go missing.

That is also where the estimate above bites hardest. A car with a clean, complete Auto-Pass file can still be one whose foreign years were never checked at all, because Auto-Pass only starts counting once the car is on Romanian plates. The absence of a foreign record in a Romanian file is not the same thing as a clean history. It usually just means nobody has looked yet.

This is why a wide country list on a provider's homepage is a weaker signal than it looks, for any of the services on this page, MrVIN included. What matters for one specific car is not how many countries a provider lists, but whether it actually holds records for the countries that car has lived in, which a free preview or a record availability check settles far better than any homepage map.

A car first registered in Germany in 2015 and only brought to Romania and registered here in 2023 has eight years that exist only in German systems. Auto-Pass will show a complete, consistent record from 2023 onward and nothing at all before it, which can look identical to a car with nothing to hide.

1. Decode the serie de șasiu confirm free, before you arrange a viewing, that the make, model, year and engine the VIN describes match the listing.
2. Ask for Auto-Pass request it from the seller for a car already registered in Romania, and treat a refusal as something worth asking about again, not ignoring.
3. Run AIDA and DGPCI both are free and need only the VIN or the plate, plus a couple of minutes each, for the insurance status and the registration status.
4. Compare the stored mileage a mechanic can read the mileage saved inside the ABS, gearbox or particle filter units and compare it against the dashboard, which is how professionals actually catch a rolled back odometer.
5. Buy one full report on the car you are serious about, especially if it was first registered abroad, and look at what it holds for that VIN before you pay.

A report from EUR 19.90 excluding VAT earns its money exactly where Auto-Pass and DGPCI go quiet: the years a car spent on another country's plates before it ever reached Romania.

None of these five steps replaces the others. A clean Auto-Pass file, a clean result from AIDA and DGPCI, and a clean full report still leave the mechanical inspection, which is the next section's subject and not something any document can cover.

Every service on this page, MrVIN and Auto-Pass included, checks records. None of them inspects the car in person. A record exists only where an inspection logged it, an authorised workshop reported it, or a registry recorded it, and a repair paid for in cash and never reported to anyone leaves no trace anywhere, at any price, from any provider.

Romanian buyers worry about specific things for good reason: hidden brake defects a document never mentions, an accident repaired abroad and never disclosed at home, rust patched over cosmetically rather than properly repaired, or a VIN that does not quite match the paperwork sitting in front of you. None of those reliably show up in a clean report on their own. They show up at a viewing, to someone who knows exactly what to look for.

So read a clean report correctly: it means nothing bad was recorded, not that nothing bad happened to the car. Pair it with a test drive and an independent mechanic's inspection, in that order, and treat the report as the cheap first filter rather than the final word on the car.

The same limit applies to Auto-Pass specifically. Its four kinds of source, RAR and ITP inspections, tachograph and speed limiter workshops, authorised repairers, and manufacturers, importers and distributors, cover a genuinely wide net for anything that passed through one of those doors. A repair, or a rolled back odometer, that never went near any of them leaves the same gap in Auto-Pass that it leaves everywhere else.

We rank ourselves first on our own page, so treat it as a claim rather than a finding, and it is easy enough to check for yourself. Open the sample report each service publishes and look at what is actually filled in, not how the page around it happens to be designed, since a sample is chosen by the vendor to flatter the product.

Then take the VIN or serie de șasiu of a car you are actually considering and run whatever each service offers for free: a decode, a record availability check, or Auto-Pass itself if the car is already on Romanian plates. Note which ones show you something specific to that particular car, and which only confirm what you could already read off the registration document.

Finally, take each paid service to checkout without actually paying, and write down the total in lei or euros. The number on a homepage is not always the number at the end, and the date on this page exists for the same reason: a price comparison without a date on it is worth very little a year from now.

For RAR Auto-Pass specifically, the check is even quicker: if the car is already registered in Romania, request it and see for yourself whether the mileage sequence across its four source types lines up with the number the seller is quoting today.