Here's what your full Carlytics report looks like

The specification, recall and known-issues sections behave the same way for any car carrying a manufacturer-issued VIN. Which body of reference data builds them is decided by the VIN itself: a North American-built car is decoded against North American data, a European-built car against European data. We never cross the two, because the same nameplate built for two markets is two different cars and mixing the data produces a confident wrong answer.

The mileage section is where a UAE report differs most. The sample shows a dated series of readings because the car lived in a market that records one at every periodic inspection. We hold no per-car Emirates odometer series, so that section will show what was actually found and, where nothing was found, will say so. An empty row is the honest output; an extrapolated line would not be.

Nothing in the sample is an auction record. There are no auction photographs, no bid histories and no hammer prices in any paid report, because those belong to the auction houses. What can surface an ex-auction car is the public listing trail — where a VIN was advertised as salvage or rebuilt while it was still on sale abroad — and that is checked, but it is a different thing and a thinner one.

You will also not find a GCC-specification verdict, because for most makes that distinction is not in the VIN. The manufacturer plate and the regional service history are what substantiate it, and both are in the seller's hands rather than ours. We would rather leave that field empty than print a guess that a buyer would reasonably act on, which is the rule we apply to every field in the report.

The recall section deserves a note of its own here. A campaign is issued against a build in the market that build was sold into, and it stays open against that build until the work is carried out on the individual car. An American-built import can therefore show an open campaign that was in fact completed in the United States before the car was shipped, because a repair done abroad does not necessarily appear in anything you or we can see afterwards. Treat an open campaign as a question for an authorised workshop rather than as a settled fact about the car.

Two sections will read thinner on a Gulf car than they do on the European sample, and it is fairer to say so up front. Import and registration records are one: we hold no Emirates registration file, so that entry reflects what the VIN and its public trail establish, not a local record. Accident and damage records are the other: repairs carried out here, and repairs carried out abroad without an insurance claim, exist in no register that anyone can query at any price. A lift, a torch and a paint gauge remain the only reliable way to find them.

Everything in the sample is unlocked, so you can judge the depth before spending AED 39. Run the free decode on the VIN you are actually considering first — it takes seconds and it will tell you which of the three Gulf import routes the car in front of you actually came by.