CARFAX - New & Used Cars

Review by eFreeware

The most distinctive thing about the CARFAX app is that a vehicle history report comes attached to the used-car listings themselves. That is a different starting point from a plain classifieds browse, where you see a price and a photo first and have to go looking for the car's past afterward.

That shapes who the app is for. If you are shopping for a used or certified pre-owned car and you care about what happened to it before it reached the lot, this is built around that question. If you are mainly after new-car inventory or want to browse without thinking about history, the app still lists vehicles, but the history angle is the reason it exists.

CARFAX has been on Google Play since June 2012 and sits at a 4.7 average from more than 35,000 ratings, with over 5 million installs. It is free, with no ads and no in-app purchases, which matters when a shopping tool is meant to be opened repeatedly over weeks of searching.

The report that comes with a used listing

Every used car listing in the app includes a CARFAX Vehicle History Report at no cost, according to the developer. That report is where the substance sits: reported accidents and damage, including how severe it was and where the car was hit, plus whether the airbags have ever deployed and whether there is flood damage or other potential problems.

It also covers ownership. You can see how many owners a car has had and what it was used for, along with a history of odometer readings. Title information matters here too, including whether a vehicle has been salvaged, junked or declared a lemon, and the report adds service history and state emissions and inspection results.

CARFAX says its vehicle history database for North America is the largest of its kind, built from over 151,000 sources and more than 35 billion records. That scale is the pitch, and it is the kind of claim worth weighing rather than taking as settled. The report is meant to answer the questions a buyer would otherwise have to chase down separately.

Search, alerts and the tools around the listings

Listings themselves carry photos, top features and mileage, and you can narrow results with filtered searches and sorting rather than scrolling through everything nearby. There is a comparison view for putting listings side by side, which is the part that saves the most effort once you have three or four candidates and cannot keep them straight in your head.

Price is handled in more than one way. You can save favorites and get alerts when the price drops, and you can look at the price history of cars you are interested in. The app also shows how CARFAX calculates a car's value based on its history, which is a useful counterweight to a seller's asking price.

Two smaller features round out the shopping loop. Listings include dealership reviews written by customers, so you get some sense of the seller as well as the car, and you can check whether a vehicle is still available directly in the app instead of calling to find out it sold last week.

What the app asks of you

There is no cost to use the app. It is free to download, carries no ads and has no in-app purchases, and the vehicle history reports on used listings are included rather than sold as an extra.

The requirement is a practical one: this is a shopping tool for cars near you, so it works best when you are actively looking and have a location in mind. It is also oriented toward used and certified pre-owned inventory, since that is where the history reports apply. Someone comparing new-car trims across dealers is using a narrower slice of what the app offers.

The other thing it asks is patience. Price alerts, price history and saved favorites only become useful over the course of a search, when you have cars you are tracking and want to know if one of them moves. Opening it once and expecting an answer is not really the shape of the thing.

Getting the most from a search

I would start with filters rather than browsing. Set the body style, mileage range and price ceiling you can actually live with, then sort the results, because the app is built to cut a large local inventory down to a shortlist. From there, save anything plausible as a favorite, even if the price is currently too high.

That is where the alerts earn their keep. A car you liked at one price becomes interesting at another, and the app will tell you when that happens instead of making you check back. The price history view is the companion to that: it shows whether the number you are looking at is where the car has been sitting or a recent move.

Before you commit to a drive, use the report properly. Accidents, airbag deployment, flood damage and title branding are the items that change a decision, and odometer readings and service history tell you how the car was treated between owners. If a listing survives that reading and the availability check says it is still on the lot, you have a reasonable case for going to see it.

If something misbehaves, the developer points to a Send Feedback option under the More tab, which routes comments to the team directly.

A buying companion rather than a browsing app

CARFAX is worth installing if you are in the market for a used car and want the history in front of you while you shop, not after you have already made a trip. The free reports on listings, the price alerts and the comparison tools cover the parts of a search that are tedious to do by hand, and the app costs nothing to keep on your phone between purchases.

It is a less obvious fit if your search is mostly new cars, or if you enjoy browsing listings without a particular purchase in mind. The app is at its best when you have a shortlist and a decision to make.

For the buyer who wants to know what a car has been through before handing over money, the combination of history reports, price tracking and dealer reviews in one place is a sensible way to organize the work.

What's new in version 6.51.1

Thanks for choosing CARFAX for your car search! Got feedback? We'd love to hear from you! Share your feedback directly with our team by using "Send Feedback" under the More tab. This update includes: Misc. bug fixes and enhancements.