Don't buy a used or imported car with a hidden past.

Three quite different kinds of car sit in the same Australian classifieds and they carry different risks. A locally delivered car — sold new here through the manufacturer's own network — has an Australian compliance history and a local service trail you can usually reconstruct. A used import brought in under the specialist and enthusiast rules is a Japanese or British car with an offshore first life you generally cannot see. And a grey-market conversion is a car that was never engineered for these roads at all.

The VIN normally tells you which one you are looking at within the first three characters. A car built in Australia carries an Australian world-manufacturer code in the 6-series; a Japanese-built car starts with J; German with W; British with S; Korean with K. That is a free, instant sanity check on a listing that claims to be a local delivery.

The exception is important. A car that arrived without a compliant 17-character VIN can be issued one at import, including under a code reserved for privately imported vehicles. Those seventeen characters are a valid Australian identifier, but they were not written by the manufacturer, so positions four to nine hold no factory descriptor. No decoder can recover the original grade or engine variant from them, and any service that returns a confident build for such a VIN is guessing. On those cars, the original chassis plate in the engine bay is the identifier that matters.

Australia does not run a national periodic inspection with a recorded odometer reading for every car every year, which means the country has fewer dated mileage checkpoints than most of Europe. On a locally delivered car that gap is usually filled by service history and by the readings taken at each roadworthy inspection when ownership changes. On an imported car there is often nothing at all before the compliance date.

That is where wound-back kilometres survive. A car that left Japan or the United Kingdom with 190,000 km can be advertised here at 110,000 km, and unless someone goes back to the export paperwork the lower number becomes the accepted history. Ask for the export or de-registration certificate on any import and compare it with the dash. If the seller cannot produce it, the honest position is that the odometer is unverified — not that it is wrong, and certainly not that it is right.

Australia produces two damage patterns at a scale few markets match. Hail events write off thousands of cars in an afternoon, and flooding does the same across whole suburbs. Both produce cars that are repaired and returned to the market, and both produce cars that are repaired and never recorded anywhere, because the owner chose not to claim.

A statutory write-off is recorded and a repairable write-off is recorded; an uninsured repair is not. No history check in the world — ours, or anyone else's at any price — can surface damage that was never reported to anybody. This is where a physical inspection beats every database: panel gaps, paint thickness, a musty smell, corrosion where there should be none. Treat the registers as the floor of your diligence and the inspection as the part that actually finds hail and flood repair.