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Terms of Use

Last updated 8 November 2026

Who operates this service

The Lane Check is operated by Vent Pro NYC Inc., 1712 East 22nd Street, New York, NY 11229, United States. “The Lane Check” is a trading name used by that company for this service. Payments are processed by Stripe and will appear on your statement as LANECHECK.

Contact: support@thelanecheck.com

What this tool is

The Lane Check analyzes the concentration of owner complaints filed with NHTSA for a vehicle’s year, make and model, and reports whether drivetrain-related complaints are elevated relative to a normal band.

What this tool is not

  • It is not a vehicle inspection and does not assess the condition of any individual vehicle.
  • It is not a vehicle history report. It does not show accidents, ownership, title brands, salvage history or odometer records.
  • It is not a proven prediction system. It describes patterns in complaint data; it does not forecast whether a particular vehicle will fail.
  • It is not financial advice or a purchase recommendation. Any repair-cost range it shows is a rough, experimental estimate, not a quote.
  • It does not indicate whether a specific VIN has an open or unrepaired recall. Check the VIN directly with NHTSA.

Accounts

Your first report needs no account; after that you need one. You create one by asking for a sign-in code at an email address you control, and you must give an address you actually control — we send a code to it and anyone holding that inbox can sign in. Keep access to it, and tell us at once if you believe someone else has got into your account. One account is for one person; do not share your sign-in codes or your session. We may suspend an account that is shared, resold, automated against our rate limits, or used to scrape the service.

Free reports

Your first report is free and needs no account. If you then sign in, that free report is the one your account starts with. A report is one vehicle. Re-opening a vehicle you have already run does not use another one, so a repeated look at the same VIN is free. After the free report, running a further vehicle requires a 30-day pass. The free report is per person, and creating extra accounts or clearing your browser to get more free reports is a misuse of the service.

The 30-day pass

The pass is $12.99, paid once. It gives unlimited VIN reports for 30 days from the moment Stripe confirms payment, together with compare and the model-year trend. “Unlimited” means there is no count of vehicles; it is for one person shopping for their own car, and it remains subject to the fair-use rate limits that protect the free NHTSA services this tool depends on. The pass does not renew and we take no further payment; when it ends, your account goes back to the free tier and any reports you already ran stay readable. If you buy another pass before the current one ends, the new 30 days are added to the end of it, so nothing is lost by buying early. Use the same email at checkout that you sign in with; that is how the pass finds your account.

Free quote preview. Signed in, you can upload a dealer quote without a pass, check the figures, and see a short preview of what we found (for example, whether the totals add up). Free previews are limited per account and per day, and we may pause them when demand is high. The full explanation, calculations, questions and drafted reply need a pass.

Each pass also includes one dealer-quote review, usable while the pass is running: either one quote explained (Explain My Dealer Quote) or one comparison of up to two quotes (Compare Dealer Quotes). It is used when the first explanation or comparison is produced. If you explained one quote, adding a second quote to compare with it does not use another review. An upload, a reading or a report that fails does not use it; correcting the figures of the same quotes afterwards, comparing them again and drafting replies to the dealer are free. A second pass adds a second review. The explanation and comparison describe the documents you upload and check their arithmetic from the figures you confirm; a comparison does not judge the vehicles’ quality or value or which deal to take, and a drafted reply is a suggestion that you edit and send yourself. Its plain-English wording is written by an AI model and can be wrong. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, it does not value the car or judge any price or fee, and it does not tell you whether to buy. Check anything that matters with the dealer before you sign.

If you have not run a report on the pass and email us within 7 days of paying, we will refund it in full. Once a VIN report, a quote explanation or a quote comparison has been produced the pass is used and is not refundable, except where the law where you live says otherwise.

A pass bought before 4 October 2026 at the earlier price is treated the same way: it is unlimited until it ends.

Price changes and earlier plans

We may change the price of the pass. A change applies to passes bought after it, never to one you have already paid for. The monthly subscription and the dealer tools offered before 4 October 2026 are no longer sold.

Availability

This service is built on free public NHTSA APIs that we do not control. If NHTSA is slow, changes its data, or is unavailable, the service will be too. We do not promise any particular uptime. If we are down for more than three consecutive days in a billing period, email us and we will credit that period.

Your data

What we store and what we do with it is described in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms. You can have your account deleted at any time by emailing us.

Ending the agreement

You may stop using the service at any time. We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms; where the breach is not deliberate we will tell you what the problem is first and give you a chance to fix it. If we close your account without cause, we refund the unused part of the period you have paid for.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, and any dispute will be heard in the state or federal courts sitting in Kings County, New York.

Auction arbitration

Any description of auction light conventions is general information only. Arbitration outcomes depend on NAAA rules, the specific written or verbal announcement, sale price and mileage thresholds, time limits, defect type, inspection findings, auction channel and local auction policy. Nothing here creates or guarantees any arbitration right. Always review the condition report, announcements and the auction’s current arbitration policy before bidding.

Data accuracy

All data comes from NHTSA public APIs and is presented as retrieved. It may be incomplete, delayed or inaccurate. Complaints are unverified reports submitted by vehicle owners. Where a lookup fails, the tool reports that the service was unavailable rather than reporting an absence of records — but you should not treat any result as a complete record of a vehicle or model.

No warranty and limitation of liability

This service is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied. To the fullest extent permitted by law, the operator is not liable for any loss or damage arising from use of, or reliance on, this service — including purchasing decisions, bids placed, or vehicles bought or declined.

You are responsible for your own due diligence on every vehicle.

Acceptable use

Do not use this service to place automated load on NHTSA’s public APIs, to resell the data, or in any way that breaches NHTSA’s terms.

Contact

support@thelanecheck.com

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