I made use of the site info to avoid Scottish cars, due mainly to the excess salt used.

This is borne out once more as i have just seen an underbody photo of a Japanese 4x4 for sale on a make specific forum, the rear underbody photo to show the recent exhaust (pricey) is showing extensive rusting, sure enough the scanned service history is all Scotland.

I suppose we have a half way house situation now, but not as handy as being able to rule out vehicles from a certain area and whittle a short list down before even contacting a single seller.

Edited by gordonbennet on 13/08/2018 at 13:36

I think it was withdrawn because it made it fairly easy to find the owner of a car just from its numberplate in some less populated areas.

In the small rural town where I live, there are only a couple of garages which the majority of locals use, so by searching for the numberplate on the MOT you could find which town someone lived in. It then wouldn't take very long to drive or cycle round every street one evening to spot the car parked on a drive.

This could be an issue for semi - famous people who don't want everyone to be able to find out where they live (CEOs of large companies etc), or owners of rare desirable cars which might be targeted for theft (Audi RS6 etc). It probably wouldn't worry the average Joe in his five year old Astra much though...

The V5C number will only be known by the current owner, unless they have chosen to give this information out, e.g. when the car is up for sale.