Tesla service history: who holds the record

Tesla's own service record

Tesla has no scheduled service regime to keep a history of. Maintenance is condition-based, so there is no "full service history" in the conventional sense and no stamp book to forge. What exists instead is a set of service invoices held inside the owner's Tesla Account.

Tesla app — Service tab. Past service invoices appear as PDFs in the account of the current owner.

How to actually get it

1. Get the invoices from the seller BEFORE the car changes hands. This is the single most important thing on this page for a Tesla.
2. A Tesla can only be attached to one Tesla Account at a time. The buyer claims the vehicle with the VIN and a V5C in their own name, and the previous owner is removed — so the seller's invoice history does not travel with the car.
3. Once the transfer is done, neither party can pull the other's records. Ask for PDFs or screenshots while you still can.

What we could not verify

A row of sites will tell you all of this with total confidence. We checked Tesla's own published material and could not, so here is the list rather than a plausible guess. If one of these matters to your purchase, it is a question to put to the dealer directly.

• A UK Tesla phone number we could confirm on Tesla's own live page.
• Whether third-party EV specialist work appears anywhere in Tesla's records.

The one brand where the record is destroyed by the sale

On every other make in this list, the manufacturer's record survives the change of keeper and can be requested later. On a Tesla it effectively does not: the account is reassigned to the new owner and the old invoice history goes with the old account. If you are buying a used Tesla, treat "I'll send them over after" as a refusal.

What the MOT trail shows about a Tesla

This is not a service history and cannot be turned into one — the MOT record says nothing about oil changes, cambelts or brake fluid. What it is, is the one independent record of the car’s life that the seller has never been able to touch. Two things in it are real evidence about maintenance: the mileage the invoices have to agree with, and what testers keep writing up.

The mileage spread is the number to take to a viewing. Half of all Tesla vehicles in our data average between 7,807 and 14,277 miles a year across their whole life. A car well outside that band is not automatically suspect — but it should match the story the seller and the invoices tell, and a service book whose intervals imply a very different annual mileage from the odometer is the discrepancy you came to find.

Read that list as a checklist rather than a verdict. Every item on it is something a service should have caught before a tester saw it, so when you look at a specific Tesla’s MOT history, the question is not whether these appear — they appear on most cars — but whether they appear and then stop. An advisory that is written up at three consecutive tests is a fault the owner was told about three times and left alone, and it is telling you more about how the car was looked after than the folder is.

Across all 31 makes we cover, 53.3% of latest tests logged at least one item, so treat Tesla's 43.9% as a brand-level comparison and nothing more. It says nothing about the particular car you are looking at, and brands whose fleets are younger and less heavily used will read lower for reasons that have nothing to do with servicing. For the individual car, run its registration.