Skip to content

Vehicles

Cars, vans, bikes — anything with a UK registration plate. LifeFile fills in everything DVLA + DVSA know automatically; you focus on the bits only you have.

Adding a vehicle

Click Add another vehicle in the dashboard's Vehicles section. Two fields:

  • Vehicle name — a short label you'd recognise on a document. "Tesla", "The Land Rover", or just the registration.
  • Registration plate (optional) — if you supply this, LifeFile hits the DVLA Vehicle Enquiry Service and the DVSA MOT History API and pre-fills make, year, fuel, engine size, colour, CO₂, current tax status, MOT status, MOT expiry date, last test mileage, and total test count.

Both lookups are free, official, and read-only. We cache the result on the model, so refreshing later costs nothing — we only re-call the APIs when you click Refresh.

If you skip the plate, the page still works — you can add it later from the Setup helper tab.

What appears on the vehicle page

Same two-tab layout as houses:

  • Documents (default) — every document filed against this vehicle.
  • Setup helper — the schedule + a DVLA panel.

The DVLA panel shows the plate, make, year, fuel and colour as a header, plus two status cards:

  • MOT — Valid until 12 Mar 2027, Expired 5 Jan 2025, or No MOT yet (vehicle may be under 3 years old).
  • Tax — Taxed until 1 Aug 2026, SORN, or Untaxed.

Click Refresh any time to re-pull live status — useful right after you re-tax or after the annual MOT.

The vehicle schedule

Universal items (every vehicle):

  • V5C / vehicle log book — the DVLA registration certificate
  • MOT certificate — annually after age 3 (the slot is auto-suppressed for vehicles under 3 years old)
  • Insurance certificate — annual; legally required to drive
  • Vehicle tax (VED) confirmation — DVLA renewal record / SORN declaration
  • Service history / service book — stamps or digital service record
  • Purchase invoice / receipt — proves date and price
  • Warranty / aftersales pack — manufacturer warranty + extended cover
  • Manufacturer recall notices — completion letters per VIN

Each Why & how expander explains why it matters (sale-time relevance, warranty claims, insurance disputes) and where to get one if you've lost it.

What's not in the schedule yet

A future iteration will add lookup-driven specifics:

  • MOT advisories — the DVSA API returns the full test history including advisory items; we don't yet surface these as their own action items.
  • Insurance group / ULEZ status — derivable from the make/year/fuel data we already pull.
  • Service interval reminders — manufacturer-spec service intervals.

If you want to track any of these, drop a note in the GitHub issues.