How to read a 200-point inspection report

Every used car we sell arrives with a completed 200-point report. Most buyers skim it, see no red entries, and stop there. That is the wrong way round: the useful information is rarely in the colour coding.

A report is a snapshot of condition on a given date. It tells you what a trained pair of eyes found, what was repaired before the car reached the floor, and — if you read it properly — what the next two years of ownership are likely to cost you.

Start at the back, not the front

The first pages cover paperwork and identity checks: VIN match, finance and theft registers, mileage verified against service entries. Necessary, but nothing there changes your decision — a car either clears those checks or never reaches a showroom.

Brake and tyre measurements are given in millimetres, not as a pass or fail. A car with 4 mm of front pad has passed inspection and will still need pads within a year. That is not a fault in the car or in the report; it is a cost you should know about before you negotiate.

The two numbers

Pad thickness and tyre date code. Neither is a fault, both are money, and they are the two figures I would read before the mileage.

What “repaired before sale” really tells you

We list every fault we found, including the ones we fixed. Some sellers see that as advertising their own problems. We see it differently: a repair entry tells you the part is new, which is better than not knowing how old it was.

Look for clusters. One replaced sensor is routine. Three electrical repairs in the same loom area on a six-year-old car is a pattern, and a pattern is worth asking about before you sign anything.

The five entries I check first

1. 01 Front pad and disc thickness In millimetres against the manufacturer minimum, not as a verdict.
2. 02 Tyre date codes, all four Full tread on six-year-old rubber is still six-year-old rubber.
3. 03 Service interval history, not just stamps Gaps between services say more than the count of them.
4. 04 Fluid condition, especially brake fluid Cheap to fix, expensive to ignore, and often skipped by previous owners.
5. 05 Anything listed as “monitor” It means we saw something that is not a fault yet. Ask what we expect it to become.

What a report cannot tell you

It cannot predict the future. A car that passes 200 points today can develop a fault next month, which is exactly why the warranty exists and why it is ours rather than a third party’s. Read the report for what it is: an honest account of the present.

And if a line in a report is unclear, that is our failure of wording, not your failure of understanding. Call the workshop and ask. We wrote it; we can explain it.

Written by

Sofia Marchetti

Runs the 200-point inspection across all seven workshops. The warranty exists because she says it can. Fourteen years with the marques we sell, eleven of them under the same lift in Milan.