A professional pre-shipment inspection typically costs a small fraction of the vehicle price and routinely pays for itself. A thorough inspection covers: paint thickness measurement across 30+ points to map body repairs; structural assessment of pillars, rails and crossmembers for accident damage; engine and transmission operation; a full electronic scan for fault codes; suspension and underbody checks for leaks and rust; and, for EVs, battery SOH and thermal management performance. You receive a written report with photos before the car is loaded — if the car fails, you can stop the shipment or renegotiate. Skipping the inspection to save a small fee is the classic false economy in used car importing: discovering a problem after arrival is far more expensive than preventing it at origin.

Many car owners do not have their first maintenance done at authorized dealerships, leading to gaps in early data. In such cases, we do not blindly trust the odometer; instead, we analyze the tire production dates and wear levels, as well as the depth of grooves on the brake disc edges, using the "gold standard" of physical wear to infer the intensity of early use.

This involves personal privacy, and we have no right or ability to retrieve personal driving violation records from the traffic police system. We can only infer if there was aggressive driving by checking if the engine has been reprogrammed with a higher-level ECU (stage 1/2) or if the transmission has a history of severe overheating.