Where to check a car before you buy

There are two kinds of checking a used car, and buyers usually do them in the wrong order. Checking the record is cheap, takes minutes, and can be done from your phone before you agree to meet. Checking the metal costs money and an afternoon. Do the records first: they eliminate most of the cars, so you only spend the afternoon on one that deserves it.

It starts with the VIN

Almost nothing can be checked without the vehicle identification number. Ask the seller for the VIN and the registration number before you arrange anything, and treat a refusal as an answer: a private seller with nothing to hide gives you both, because every serious buyer asks. When you see the car, match the VIN on the windscreen and the body plate against the registration document. Mismatched or tampered plates end the conversation.

CSDD: the official Latvian record

CSDD (csdd.lv) is the registry of every vehicle registered in Latvia, and its e-services are the single most useful check you can run. From the VIN or the plate you can see the technical data, the current registration status, and — most importantly — the roadworthiness inspection history with the odometer reading recorded at each one.

That history is a mileage timeline nobody can quietly edit. A car showing 180,000 km at its inspection two years ago and 140,000 km in the ad has been wound back. Small gaps or a suspiciously flat year deserve a question too. CSDD also sells a fuller vehicle history report for a few euros, which is a trivial cost against a four-figure purchase.

One caveat: CSDD only knows the Latvian part of the story. A car imported at three years old has its first three years recorded somewhere else.

Owner, lease, and pledge

The Latvian registration document distinguishes the owner (īpašnieks) from the holder (turētājs). On a leased car the leasing company is the owner and the driver is only the holder — which means the person offering to sell it to you cannot legally transfer it until the lease is settled. This is normal and it can be resolved, but it has to be resolved before money moves, with the leasing company involved.

The same applies to a car pledged as security for a loan. Ask directly whether the car is under lease or pledged, and confirm the answer against the document rather than the seller's tone.

International history reports

For an imported car, a paid VIN-history service is the only practical way to see the years before Latvia. These reports aggregate registrations, insurance write-offs, auction listings, service entries, and mileage snapshots from other countries, often with photographs. They are not complete and they do miss cars, but they are decisive when they hit: an auction photo of the same VIN with a caved-in front end is worth every cent of the report.

Read the report for the shape of the history, not just the verdict. Repeated country changes, a gap right after a damage entry, or mileage that steps backwards are all worth more than a green summary badge.

The workshop hour

Records cannot tell you about a leaking gearbox. When a car survives the paperwork, book an hour at an independent workshop — one you chose, not one the seller recommended — and pay for a pre-purchase inspection. Expect it to cost a few tens of euros, and expect it to be the best money you spend in the entire process.

On a lift, a mechanic sees what you cannot: corrosion on the subframe and body seams, suspension and steering play, brake and disc wear, leaks from the engine, gearbox and shocks, and evidence of collision repair on the structural members. Ask them to read the fault codes and the readiness monitors — codes cleared an hour before the viewing show up as monitors that have not completed a cycle yet.

A paint thickness gauge takes five minutes and tells you which panels have been repainted; the workshop will have one, and so do many independent inspectors who come to the car for a flat fee.

Checks you can run yourself in five minutes

• Photograph the VIN plate and the registration document, and compare both against the ad.
• Look up the model's known weak points before the viewing — every engine has two or three, and knowing them turns a vague worry into a specific question.
• Search the phone number from the ad. A number attached to a dozen live car ads belongs to a trader, whatever the ad says.
• Compare the ad against the market: an unusually cheap car is priced for a reason that will eventually be yours.

What to do with what you find

Very few used cars come back clean on everything, so the point of checking is not a perfect score — it is knowing what you are buying and what it will cost to fix. A known worn part with a quoted repair price is a negotiating number. A mismatch between the odometer and the CSDD record, a structural repair, or an unresolved lease are not negotiating numbers: they are reasons to walk away and check the next car.

Check more cars, not the same car twice

The buyers who end up with good cars are the ones who ran these checks on several candidates rather than talking themselves into the first one. That takes seeing the listings early, which is what adbuzz does: it watches ss.lv around the clock and sends every new match and price change to Telegram within minutes, free, so your checking time goes to cars that are still available.