Where your car's service history should actually live
A glovebox folder fades and a manufacturer's app can vanish. We keep the Astra's mileage, services and MOT on our own server, where they stay ours for good.
The folder in the glovebox
For most cars the service history is a booklet with a few stamps in it and a wad of receipts behind it. It works right up until it doesn’t — a stamp missing, a receipt faded, the whole folder gone the week you come to sell. The newer version is a manufacturer’s app, and in one way that’s worse: the record of your car now sits on their system, on their terms, and it can be tied to the brand or switched off whenever they decide the app has had its day.
Where ours lives
We keep the Astra’s whole history in our own maintenance log, running on servers we run in the UK — every service, the mileage over time, and when the next MOT falls due. Log a job once and it stays logged. It doesn’t depend on a company keeping an app running, and it doesn’t vanish if we ever move the car on. It’s our record of our car, kept where we keep everything else.
The figures on the car’s page
This is also the record behind the numbers on the Astra’s own page: the mileage, the last service and the next MOT shown there trace back to this log, not to a figure someone typed in once and forgot. It’s a small thing, but it’s the difference between a page that happens to be right and one that’s right because it comes from where the work is actually recorded.
Keeping on top of the basics
A record is only worth keeping if you keep up with the thing it records, and most of that is just the basics done regularly: checking the tyre pressures, keeping it clean, catching the small stuff before it turns into the big stuff. We keep a 12V tyre inflator and a pack of microfibre cloths in the boot for exactly that, and log what gets done as we go.
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None of this is complicated. A car builds up a history whether you keep it or not, and the only real question is who ends up holding it. We’d rather it were us, the same as its footage, its journeys, and everything else we’ve brought onto our own side rather than left on someone else’s.
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