2017 FORD ESCAPE SE VIN 1FMCU9GD9HUC76188

The Ford Escape SE described here left the factory in 2017. The petrol engine has four cylinders and produces 170 hp. There is an automatic gearbox, with four-wheel drive. The specification is taken from the source data and has not been checked against other documents.

At the time of recording, the car had covered 108,772 miles. Because the clock counts miles, any figure noted in kilometres has to be converted before the two can be compared. Services and inspections note the distance covered, so a car with an ordinary past builds up a trail of figures that climb year after year. A service book or a folder of workshop invoices is the simplest place to find past readings.

When the car was recorded, it showed flood damage. A damage type says what kind of damage the car had, not how serious it was or whether it has been repaired since. With flood damage on file, the inspection should start with the wiring, connectors and electronics, and any corrosion under the carpets.

The record notes that the car ran and drove. A key was noted with the car.

According to the source data, the car has a salvage title. A title like this is issued when repair was judged uneconomical or unsafe.

A car’s history answers three questions: who kept it, how it was looked after and what went wrong along the way. Pieces of a car’s history sit with registries, dealers, workshops and insurance companies, and none of them sees the whole picture. A clean, polished car can still hide a serious accident, a flood or years of hard use.

A cold start, the colour of the exhaust smoke and any oil leaks tell a mechanic a good deal about how an engine has been treated. A petrol engine in good order starts cleanly, idles evenly and pulls without hesitation. Automatic transmissions, CVTs included, are expensive to repair, so the test drive should include pulling away from a standstill and a stretch at motorway speed. A car with four-wheel drive has extra differentials and often a transfer case, which an inspection should cover alongside the engine and gearbox.

The ninth character of the VIN is a check digit calculated from the other sixteen, so a mistyped or invented number does not add up. This car’s identification number is 1FMCU9GD9HUC76188. Scratches, fresh paint or a replaced plate around the VIN markings are warning signs in their own right.

A VIN report gathers what different sources know about a car, such as the number of owners, mileage readings, damage and any branded title. No report is complete: a repair done privately and never claimed on insurance leaves nothing to find. A professional inspection makes sense whatever the paperwork shows, because no report measures corrosion, worn bushes or a poor repair. With this 2017 Ford Escape SE, the first step is a look at the history behind VIN 1FMCU9GD9HUC76188.