RAC Vehicle Inspections Review: 307 Points and a 20-Mile Road Test

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An RAC vehicle inspection starts at £132 for the Basic and reaches £290 for the Advanced, which is a 307-point mechanical and structural check with a road test of up to 20 miles. The middle option, the Comprehensive, is from £225 and covers the same 307 points with a 10-mile road test. All three prices were taken from RAC's own booking pages on 14 September 2026.

The organisation behind them has been doing this a long time. The RAC was founded in 1897, put uniformed patrols on the road in 1901 and roadside telephone boxes up in 1912. It now carries more than 13.6m UK personal and business members, employs around 4,000 staff across bases in Walsall, Manchester and Bristol, attended 2.6 million breakdowns in 2023 and repairs four out of five vehicles where they stop. A pre-purchase inspection uses the same kind of engineer: someone travels to wherever the car is sitting, drives it, writes it up and emails the report. Bookings go through 0330 159 0720, Monday to Friday 8am to 6pm and Saturday 9am to 5.30pm, and RAC says it aims to inspect within 48 hours of the request.

One eligibility rule is worth knowing before you ring. The £132 Basic is not available for a car over 10 years old, over 120,000 miles, with more than five seats, or for a 4-wheel drive, convertible, van, motorhome, kit car, LPG conversion, modified car or recorded write-off. A great many second-hand cars fall into at least one of those, and for those buyers the entry price is the £225 Comprehensive rather than the advertised £132. Neither the Comprehensive nor the Advanced carries a maximum age, and nothing above 3.5 tonnes gross vehicle weight can be inspected at all. Motorcycles are not covered.

What £132, £225 and £290 buy you

The Basic is the short version: a mechanical and structural check of the major areas, a full underbody look, a road test of up to 3 miles and a condition report emailed by the engineer. It is the only package with an eligibility list, and that list is long.

The Comprehensive at £225 is where the inspection becomes the thing most buyers have in mind. It runs to a 307-point check, adds the main functions and controls, the full interior, bodywork and paint, takes the road test to 10 miles, and finishes with a verbal summary from the engineer as well as the emailed report. That phone call matters more than it sounds: an engineer will tell you things on the phone about how a car drove that no tick-box form captures.

The Advanced at £290 keeps all of that and adds a diagnostic scan for stored system fault codes, a brake fluid test and analysis, a road test of up to 20 miles, and photographs of the exterior, the milometer, the documents and anything found wrong. Two extras are priced separately rather than bundled: oil analysis at £39, with the laboratory findings following 3 to 5 working days later, and a photo pack at £18 if you want pictures on a Comprehensive. Classics, high-performance and prestige cars and anything over 20 years old attract a £30 charge for specialist ramps.

Prices move with the car. RAC says the figure depends on the age, value and model of the vehicle, so £132, £225 and £290 are floors rather than fixed fees, and the only way to find your number is to ring for it.

The road test is where this inspection earns its money

Most of what an inspection finds, an attentive buyer with a torch could find too. The road test is the exception, and it is the part of the product RAC has pushed hardest. Up to 20 miles on the Advanced is long enough to get a gearbox properly hot, to hold a motorway speed, to find a vibration that only appears at 60mph and to run a diesel particulate filter through a cycle. Three miles on the Basic is a trip round the block.

Set that against the AA, which is the only directly comparable national service. The AA's own inspection pages put its Basic at a fixed £110 for non-members and £99 for members, with up to a 98-point check; its Comprehensive at £199 to £299 for non-members, up to 214 points; and its Advanced at £279 to £339 for non-members, up to 221 points. Both of the AA's upper tiers stop at a 10-mile road test. So the AA is cheaper at the entry level and RAC counts more points and drives further at the top, which is a real distinction rather than a marketing one. RAC also quotes a member discount on the Comprehensive without publishing what it is worth, while the AA prints both its member and non-member prices.

Turnaround is close. RAC says inspections are typically carried out within 48 hours of the request, and elsewhere on the same site says it tries to complete all inspections within 3 working days. The AA quotes 2 to 4 working days from booking. For a private sale where somebody else is also looking at the car this weekend, neither is instant, and it is worth telling the seller the inspection is booked.

Who you are buying from, and what the FCA number covers

The contract is with RAC Motoring Services, registered in England as company number 01424399 at RAC House, Brockhurst Crescent, Walsall WS5 4AW. It is a private unlimited company, incorporated on 31 May 1979 as R.A.C. Motoring Services and renamed on 8 June 2011, with its last accounts made up to 31 December 2024. An unlimited company is an unusual structure for a business this size; it means the shareholders' liability is not capped, which is a point in the customer's favour rather than against.

RAC's compliance statement says the firm "is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in respect of insurance mediation activities", under firm reference number 310208. Read that sentence carefully, because the words "in respect of insurance mediation activities" do real work. Selling you breakdown cover is regulated. Inspecting a car is not a regulated activity at all, so the FCA permission behind the brand does not extend to the inspection you are buying, and the Financial Ombudsman Service, which RAC's complaints page names with a six-month referral window from its final response, is the right destination for an insurance dispute and the wrong one for an argument about a missed head gasket.

There is a route, and it is a decent one. RAC's complaints page says it has "subscribed to the National Conciliation Service (NCS) as they specialise in automotive dispute resolution". NCS is accredited by the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, its conciliation stage is free to consumers, and if a case goes to arbitration the published fee ladder starts at £48 plus VAT for claims of £50 to £1,000 and tops out at £345 plus VAT for claims above £15,000. RAC's own service standards sit in front of it: contact within 5 working days and a further update if a complaint is still open after 8 weeks.

What RAC's liability is capped at, and why the number is the one it is

The inspection terms and conditions are short and the most consequential clause is easy to miss. RAC accepts responsibility "for any loss, damage or injury caused by Our negligent act or omission or wilful misconduct", and then says that "Our maximum aggregate liability to You shall not exceed Our charge to You for carrying out the Inspection", death and personal injury aside. Loss of profit and other indirect loss are excluded outright.

Put plainly: if the engineer misses a fault that later costs £4,000, the most you can recover under the contract is the £225 or £290 you paid. That is not sharp practice, and it is close to universal in this trade, but it is worth understanding why the figure lands exactly there. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 a service must be performed with reasonable care and skill, and section 57 says a term is not binding on a consumer to the extent it would "exclude the trader's liability arising under section 49", nor to the extent that restricting liability would "prevent the consumer in an appropriate case from recovering the price paid". The price paid is the floor the law will not let a trader go below. RAC's cap sits on that floor.

Three further limits sit alongside it. RAC does not accept liability for "latent defects which are later discovered" or for defects not reasonably detectable at the time. The terms say the inspection cannot "Guarantee that the vehicle would pass an MOT test" or confirm manufacturer-specific model specifications. And the FAQs answer the guarantee question flatly: "No, our inspection confirms the condition of the vehicle at the time of inspection." That is an honest answer, and it is also the answer that decides what the report is for. It is evidence to negotiate with and a reason to walk away, not a warranty.

Cancellation is tight, too. You can cancel up to 12pm on the working day before the inspection; after that "the full cost of the Inspection will be due and You will not be entitled to any refund". Sellers of used cars change their minds at short notice more often than RAC's deadline allows for.

Two million used cars a quarter, and nothing in the checklist about a battery

The market this product serves is large and growing again. SMMT figures published on 11 August 2026 put used car transactions in the second quarter of 2026 at 2,009,318, up 0.7% and the first second quarter since 2021 to pass two million units. Inside that, used battery electric transactions reached 110,761, a rise of 67.0% and the strongest quarterly growth since the first quarter of 2024.

Nowhere in RAC's published material for the Basic, Comprehensive or Advanced inspection is there any mention of an electric vehicle battery, a state-of-health measurement or a high-voltage system check. On a used EV the battery is the single most expensive component and the one whose condition is least visible, so its absence from a 307-point list is the most significant gap in the product. RAC is not alone in that. There is no agreed British standard to test against yet: the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles has a standardised battery health certification scheme on its agenda, work continues on UN Global Technical Regulation No. 22 requiring an accessible state-of-health monitor in the vehicle, and the Vehicle Remarketing Association's chair has said publicly that "arriving at a standard measure of battery health is quite difficult". A buyer of a used electric car should treat any inspection as covering everything except the part that costs the most.

One other thing an inspection does not do is look at the car's past. It reports on the vehicle in front of the engineer, not on outstanding finance, stolen markers or a write-off record — those come from a separate data check, and the two products answer different questions. For scale on why the second one matters, police in England and Wales recorded 312,250 vehicle offences in the year ending March 2026, down 11%, within 1.6 million recorded thefts overall, in Office for National Statistics figures published on 23 July 2026.

The parts RAC keeps off the website

For a national service sold to the public, a surprising amount is only available by telephone. No price is shown on the individual Basic, Comprehensive or Advanced pages; the figures appear once, on the package comparison, and only as "from". There is no online booking and no instant quote, so a buyer comparing two inspections on a Saturday afternoon has to ring 0330 159 0720 and wait to be told what their car costs. The package comparison page sets out a long checklist by inspection area without marking which items belong to which package, and then says extras can be added by speaking to the team.

The member discount is quoted but never quantified. The £30 specialist ramp charge appears in the FAQs rather than on any price page. RAC does not publish the qualifications its inspection engineers hold, which is the question a careful buyer would ask first about a £290 professional opinion. And while the complaints page names the National Conciliation Service, it does not say whether a pre-purchase inspection dispute is eligible — NCS describes its own scope in terms of vehicle sales, servicing and repair work rather than inspections, and RAC says eligibility is confirmed in the outcome of a complaint, which is after the argument has started rather than before.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 14 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.