Carfax said her Subaru was in an accident. It wasn’t, and they refused to correct it for months.
Chris O’Hare, a retired Holyoke teacher, never loved a car so much as her 2021 Subaru Outback.
She bought it a year after her husband, David, died, when she was struggling with his absence after 45 years of being together. She says she splurged on it as “a salute to my new life on my own.”
Carfax, the giant vehicle data-collection company, somehow got information about her new car and began sending her “courtesy” reminders of oil changes and other maintenance. It was a marketing ploy, a way for Carfax to connect with potential customers in a seemingly helpful manner.
Carfax says it has billions of accident and maintenance records in its database, which it buys from state motor vehicle agencies, including the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles,
police departments, body shops, and other sources. The company uses its gargantuan database to generate “vehicle history” reports on millions of cars and trucks.
The company then sells those reports online for $44.99 to consumers and businesses buying and selling used vehicles. Accident reports are vital because it’s axiomatic that an accident compromises a vehicle and lowers its value.
Last summer, O’Hare clicked open a promotional Carfax email and was stunned to see that it listed her beloved Subaru as having been in an accident.
“Well, that’s just wrong, I thought, and figured it would take a few minutes to get it corrected,” O’Hare, 71, told me.
But, no, it wasn’t that simple — not even for a demonstrably erroneous record. Instead, it became an ordeal stretching over six months.
By the time she came to me for
help, O’Hare was worn out by months of emails with a Carfax “resolution manager,” who proved ineffective at resolving an obvious mistake. Three times she requested a supervisor but never got one.
And of course she couldn’t call customer service because Carfax, like a growing number of companies, doesn’t accept phone calls.
“I really hope you can help because I don’t know what else I can do,” she wrote to me.
Mind you, this was no trivial matter to O’Hare. In pervasive advertising on TV and elsewhere, Carfax hammers home that an accident lowers the value of a vehicle — and that you had better be aware of it.
“These two cars may look identical,” one video ad says, displaying two SUVs. “But with Carfax you will see how its history affects its value.” The ad shows the value of the vehicle with an accident worth $6,700 less than the “clean” one.
“Stop overpaying,” the ad says. “Shop at Carfax.”
Anyone checking O’Hare’s Subaru would see a phantom accident. O’Hare estimates a loss in value of at lease $1,200.
“I don’t want to lose money because Carfax made a mistake,” O’Hare said.
Prodded by O’Hare, Carfax identified the accident as having occurred on Dec. 17, 2022, in North Attleborough. That’s ridiculous, O’Hare thought, because on that date she was 1,500 miles away in her mobile home in Florida. Her Subaru, meanwhile, was safely locked in a garage at her condo in South Hadley.
Carfax told O’Hare that it would try to get a copy of the police report (didn’t it already have it?), but that it would be quicker for O’Hare to furnish it to the company.
“I don’t have the police report because I was not in an accident,” she reminded the resolution manager.
When O’Hare got and read the report, she felt a sense of relief because it was so obvious Carfax had made a rookie mistake by failing to distinguish between a passenger car license plate and a commercial truck license plate with the same number.
In Massachusetts, the RMV sometimes issues the same plate number to two vehicles: one passenger and one commercial. (The Registry told me there’s approximately 3,200 duplicate passenger and commercial plates.)
The accident in North Attleborough involved a box truck that lost one of its rear wheels, which then hit and damaged another vehicle.
The accident report was properly coded for a commercial vehicle, and a short narrative by police made it plain that the accident did not involve a Subaru passenger vehicle.
But Carfax still refused to remove the accident, even after O’Hare sent the resolution manager copies of her Subaru registration, showing it to be a passenger vehicle, and an insurance claims history, showing she made no claims for accidents.
Instead, Carfax told O’Hare to get the police to “correct” the accident report, which was actually correct to begin with.
O’Hare: “This is ridiculous. You can clearly see in the report that the vehicle involved is NOT my Subaru.”
Carfax: “I understand this can be frustrating. … A police report is an official document. … Carfax does not have the authority to determine if any of it contains any errors.”
O’Hare pointed out there was no error, “just a coincidence” that the registration plates for the commercial vehicle in the accident and her passenger vehicle were the same.
The last time O’Hare heard from the Carfax was Jan. 2, when the resolution manager asked for an insurance document O’Hare had already provided. After that, Carfax stopped replying to her.
O’Hare went to great lengths to provide Carfax with complete and well-organized documentation, which I regularly recommend and applaud.
She also delivered a stern lecture I cannot improve upon: “Carfax has the authority — and more importantly, the responsibility — to ensure that it does not assign a police accident report incorrectly. Knowingly doing so misleads the public, to say nothing of undermining public confidence in a company that purports to give consumers peace of mind.”
She rightly called Carfax’s conduct “malicious and intentional.”
I contacted Carfax, and the company quickly owned up to its mistake and corrected its records, though it never apologized to O’Hare in the statement released to me.
It takes work to clean up a mess like this. If it happens to you, I recommend sending a succinct, strictly factual chronology of events (based on emails) to your insurer, auto dealership, Registry of Motor Vehicles, and police department, asking them to notify Carfax of its error. And make sure Carfax knows of your efforts by copying it on all of your emails.
You should also complain on social media. And file complaints with the attorney general’s office, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Better Business Bureau.
At some point, it should dawn on the likes of Carfax that in order to stop the public relations bleeding, it must do the right thing.