Is My Car Still Under Warranty? (PDF)
Being aware if your vehicle is still under warranty can be helpful; maybe you’ll need to get it repaired and want to know what the cost might be. Contacting a dealer for the brand of car or the manufacturer themselves is one way, but there are other indirect methods that can lead to more information for free.
Terms
No matter how you go about determining if your car is under warranty, chances are you’ll need your vehicle identification number. It should be a 17-character mix of letters and numbers on either the dashboard or a sticker on the driver’s door. Memorize it or type it out – and then copy and paste it whenever you might need to provide it again.
Under warranty duration, there is a time and, usually, a mileage limit. For example, you might have the 3/36 warranty. The 3 represents the duration of the warranty, which is three years or 36,000 miles. When the first limit is reached – either three years or 36,000 miles – your warranty expires. However, some warranties have only time limits – for instance your corrosion warranty.
Automotive history has a lot of quirks, and some measurements can be a little tricky. That’s not the odometer telling you the miles – it’s how old the car is. It’s based on when the car left the factory, not its model year. For example: a 2020 model year could have been from Jan 1 to Dec 31, 2019, and not sold for weeks afterwards – that’s two years total.
You also need to know what part of the warranty is transferable to a second owner. For example, the famed 10/100 powertrain warranty offered by Hyundai, Kia and Mitsubishi only applies to the original owner, while subsequent owners get powertrain coverage for the same 5/60 as the bumper-to-bumper warranty.
If you’re looking for information about the original manufacturer warranty on your car, do a search online with the year, make, and model. You can also find information from the manufacturer’s website.
How to know the date of sale and its warranty coverage
When you’re at the dealership and you don’t know the year, make or model of a car, finding this information is often challenging. A dealership doesn’t have to give you that information – even if you can find somebody who knows – and it’s possible they’ll mess up your request. Instead, it may be best to go straight to the manufacturer.
This article will show you how to contact a manufacturer like Toyota. You can start with a Google search for “How do I contact [manufacturer]?” (e.g., “How do I contact Toyota?”). Once you get to the company’s website, look for links to its customer service or contact pages. If its customer service page features a warranty, that might be the place to go in order to find your original warranty coverage- just remember your VIN number if you want to find out whether it’s still under warranty. If there’s no customer support at all, you’ll need a little creative sleuthing on sites like Yelp.
If online resources prove unsuccessful, or you need more information about the car in question, you can use the VIN to get a report. Fees for these reports vary depending on what kind of information you’re looking for. Ordering one of these reports — which often include lots of other data about the vehicle — isn’t a bad idea if you’re considering purchasing a car as it will give you detailed information on things like ownership transfers, state that the vehicle was titled and major accidents that have occurred since its inception. One example of an organization that provides such reports is CarFax, which offers a fairly detailed summary including info on ownership transfers, previous titling states, most major accidents and some service work and mileage history.
