Does the number of previous keepers matter?

A car's keeper is the person or business registered as responsible for it, shown on the V5C registration certificate (often called the logbook). The number of previous keepers is how many different keepers the car has had before the current one.

The keeper isn't always the person who drove the car. A car that was leased or used as a company car, for example, may show a leasing or company name as its keeper, even if several different people drove it.

What it means for a buyer: a low number isn't automatically a good sign, and a higher number isn't automatically a bad one. Plenty of cars with several keepers have been well looked after. What's more worth noticing is a pattern, such as a car changing hands several times in a short space of time. That isn't proof of a problem, but it's a fair question to ask the seller, and worth comparing with the car's service history and MOT record.

Our Confidence Report shows how many previous keepers are on record, and when the keeper last changed. See the Confidence Report →