Built for people who remember their cars
How it works
Fast, simple, and private by default. Save the VINs of vehicles you’ve owned and check where they appear online.
Seventeen characters. Windshield corner, driver door jamb, title or insurance card.
Year, make, model, and colour. Most of it decodes on its own.
Optional, but it makes a garage of ten cars readable years later.
Three steps, start to found.
Create a free account
Set up your personal vehicle garage on the register page — it takes under a minute.
Password
Add the VIN
Add the vehicle's VIN with basic details like year, make, model, and color so you can identify it later. We'll decode most of it for you.
Search for it
Use built-in links to Google, Bing, and CARFAX® to see where your old vehicle shows up — a dealer lot, auction site, or salvage yard.
When it doesn't turn up straight away
Most cars are found on the fourth try.
A VIN that returns nothing today can surface the week a dealer lists it. The garage is there so you don't have to remember to keep looking.
Save it while you remember
The VIN is the hard part to recover later. Everything else can be filled in whenever.
Re-run the same searches
Listings appear and vanish. A VIN that returns nothing in March can surface in July.
Confirm it is the same car
Match the full VIN, not the year and colour. Two identical cars on one street is not rare.
Mark it found
Set the vehicle to found and it stops competing for your attention with the ones still missing.
Ever wondered what happened to a car you once owned?
FormerCars was built for exactly that. By saving a vehicle's VIN, you can track where it appears online through search engines and public listings like Google, Bing, and vehicle marketplaces.
Sometimes an old vehicle resurfaces on a dealership lot, an auction site, a classifieds listing, or even a junkyard inventory. With FormerCars you keep a private garage of VINs from vehicles you've owned and search periodically to see if they show up again. It's a simple way to stay connected to the cars that were once part of your life.
Inventory pages carry the full VIN and get indexed fast.
Lot listings and catalogues stay online long after the sale.
Private ads, club forums, marketplace posts.
Dismantler databases are searchable by VIN and rarely deleted.
Straight answers
Does it work with any VIN?
Seventeen-character VINs only — every car built from 1981 on. Shorter pre-1981 numbers were never standardised, so they cannot be decoded or reliably searched.
Do you sell my VINs?
No. Every car is private by default. You choose, per vehicle, whether it gets a public page.
Can a VIN find the current owner?
No, and it should not. It finds public traces: listings, club galleries, recall notices and title events. Who owns it now stays their business.
What does "found" mean?
Whatever you decide. Listed for sale, sitting in a yard, restored, or spotted in a parking lot. You set each vehicle to found or searching.