About Used Car Checklists

Used Car Checklists answers one question: you are about to look at a used car, so what should you check? Generic inspection lists treat every car the same. A 2018 SUV with a known steering fault needs a different test drive from a 2020 sedan with a transmission complaint, and the paperwork to ask for is different too.

Where the checklists come from

Every checklist is built from two public sources from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA): complaints owners filed about a specific model year, and the safety recalls issued for it. That data is collected and organized by our sister site, Auto Reliability Index, which scores the reliability of each model year.

Complaints are grouped by the part that failed. The common failures are then written up as checks a buyer can do at the car. Those write-ups and the complaint summaries are drafted with AI tools from the complaint records and checked against them; the counts, recall numbers, and dates come straight from NHTSA.

What a checklist cannot tell you

Complaint counts reflect what owners chose to report, not every failure, and popular models collect more complaints simply because there are more of them on the road. A short checklist does not mean a car is trouble-free. Nothing here replaces an inspection by an independent mechanic before you pay.

Used Car Checklists is not affiliated with NHTSA or any manufacturer.

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Find the checklist for your car, or read how to inspect a used car.