Vehicle search: overview

The Vehicle Lookup search type lets you look up a vehicle by its registration and pull back what the underlying source holds for it — make, model, MOT history and tax status — and optionally enrich the registered owner. Pick it from the search composer when your starting identifier is a vehicle registration rather than a username, email, phone number, or other identifier.

The UserSearch composer with the Vehicle Lookup search type active and the Vehicle Lookup (UK Only, Enriched) Module selected, showing the Vehicle Registration input and a "Cost per search: $5.00" line

When to use it

Use the Vehicle Lookup search type when you have a vehicle registration and want to:

• Retrieve the vehicle’s details — make, model, MOT history and tax status (via the Vehicle Lookup (UK Only, Enriched) Module).
• Enrich the registered owner from the registration, drawing on Pipl’s Social or Business datasets (via the two Vehicle Owner Modules).

This search type exposes four Modules — one UK vehicle lookup, one US vehicle lookup, and two owner-enrichment Modules. For the full breakdown of each Module, its cost, and what it returns, see Vehicle modules & options.

The end-to-end flow

The Vehicle Lookup search type follows the same search composer flow as every other search in UserSearch — see How UserSearch works for the general model.

1. In the composer header, open the Search type selector and choose Vehicle Lookup. It is shown with a car glyph and a chevron.
2. Pick a Module from the grid — Vehicle Lookup (UK Only, Enriched) (selected by default) or one of the other three. The Module grid is single-select: selecting one deselects the others. The selected tile is drawn with a coral-orange highlighted border, and it loads its description, its Cost per search value, and its query form below.
3. Enter your identifier in the Vehicle Registration field. In the captured build the field placeholder is a UK-style number plate (e.g. AB12CDE).
4. Confirm the Cost per search line beneath the input before you run. With Vehicle Lookup (UK Only, Enriched) selected it reads “Cost per search: $5.00” — a fixed charge, and the highest single-Module cost in the catalogue.
5. Select Search Now (the coral-orange button with a magnifier icon at the right of the input row) to run the query.

Note

Vehicle Lookup (UK Only, Enriched) is the app’s fixed out-of-box default for this Search type, not a last-used Module persisted from a previous session (per Lee, 2026-07-10). Always read the live Cost per search line for the Module you actually select.

Caution

This search type does not expose the OneScan multi-source Module or a Choose Data Source configuration modal in the captured build — only the four single-purpose Modules above were observed. Per-search filters, entity-type tabs, and OneScan are not part of the Vehicle Lookup composer as captured. See Vehicle modules & options for details and OneScan explained for how OneScan works where it is offered.

What you get back

Selecting Vehicle Lookup (UK Only, Enriched) and running a search returns, per its on-screen description, the vehicle’s make, model, MOT history and tax status for the registration. The two Vehicle Owner Modules instead resolve the registered owner via Pipl — see the Pipl data source. Results populate the Search Results panel on the right, which carries the standard Found / Enriched / Connections counters and Details / Graph tabs.

For how to read and verify those results — the counters, the results table columns, and the Details panel — see Reading Vehicle results.

Verified against UserSearch v2.0.20