How to check a car from mobile.de before you buy

mobile.de is Germany's largest vehicle marketplace, and its listings are genuinely rich: specifications, options, photos, sometimes a service booklet or an inspection certificate. All of that still comes from the seller. The seller chooses which photos to post and which details to mention, which is a normal part of selling anything, but it means the listing is a pitch, not an independent record.

What a listing structurally cannot show you is the car's recorded history: whether the mileage on the odometer lines up with earlier readings, whether damage was repaired and reported, and where the car has actually been registered. That information does not live in the ad. It lives in official registries and licensed data sources, which is what a VIN check pulls from.

Some mobile.de listings show the VIN directly; where they do not, ask the seller for it before you travel. A serious seller, private or dealer, will share it without much fuss, since it is printed on the registration document anyway and will be visible the moment you view the car in person, so there is little reason to withhold it earlier.

Be more careful if a seller is reluctant to share the VIN before a viewing. It is not sensitive information, so refusal on its own is a signal worth noting rather than ignoring. Once you do view the car, check that the VIN you were given matches the one on the registration document and the one on the car itself.

Before arranging a viewing, decode the VIN to confirm the car matches what the ad describes: make, model, year, engine. Then run a history preview on the same VIN to see whether meaningful records exist at all. Both steps take a few minutes and cost nothing if you use a free preview rather than buying a full report at this stage.

Only spend the time and money on a trip for cars whose records actually check out. It is a small filter that saves the far larger cost of travelling to see a car, or transferring a deposit, on the strength of the listing alone, before anyone has looked past what the seller chose to write.

Many mobile.de buyers are not in Germany at all; they are importing the car once the deal is done. For a remote buyer the history check matters twice as much, because returning a car that turns out to have a problem is rarely practical once it has left Germany and crossed a border, let alone once it has cleared customs somewhere else.

Running the check before you commit to shipping, transport or a long drive is the only point in the process where undoing a mistake is still cheap. After the money and the car have both moved, it is not, and a problem that was a two-minute preview beforehand becomes a much longer argument afterwards.