What RegoSnap can't tell you
Every app in this category will tell you what it does. This page is the other half, because you're about to spend thousands of dollars and you deserve to know where the tool stops.
It can't tell you the car is mechanically sound
RegoSnap reads words and documents. It has never seen the car. A listing with no warning signs and a completely clear certificate can still be a car with a failing transmission, rust under the carpet or a tired clutch. Nothing here replaces seeing the car in person and paying a mechanic to inspect it. That inspection is the best money you'll spend in the whole process.
It can't tell you a listing is safe
When RegoSnap finds nothing wrong, it says so in those words — nothing unusual found in this listing — and never that a car or a seller is safe. Finding no evidence of a scam is not evidence that there's no scam. A careful scammer writes a perfectly ordinary ad.
It can't search the PPSR for you
We're not part of the PPSR and we don't resell its searches. You run the official $2 search yourself and share the certificate with the app, which reads it. That's a deliberate design choice, not a missing feature — it keeps the government's record as the source of truth and keeps our reading of it clearly separate.
It only knows what you show it
If the screenshots cut off the seller's description, RegoSnap never sees the part that was cut off. If a certificate is missing pages, it says the result is unclear rather than guessing — it will not report "all clear" on a document it couldn't fully read. Check the details it shows you against the listing; if something's misread, fix it before relying on the verdict.
Safety ratings stop at about 2019
The Used Car Safety Ratings come from real crash data, which means a car has to have been on the road long enough to appear in it. Cars built after roughly 2019, and rarer models of any age, often have no rating. When that happens the app says the car isn't rated rather than inventing a number.
There's no live recall feed
Australia has no public data feed of vehicle recalls that an app can query, so RegoSnap can't tell you whether this specific car has an outstanding recall. It points you at the government's recall search and gives you the question to ask the seller instead.
How it's tested
Two rules run through all of it: a warning only counts if it can quote the actual line that triggered it, and "unclear" always beats a guess.
| Reading listings | 120 test screenshots with known answers, including deliberately awkward ones — typos, shorthand like "110k kms", dark mode, cropped tops, cut-off descriptions, plates only visible in a photo. All 120 read correctly, every planted scam caught, no false alarms. About 40% of the scams were worded in ways the app's instructions never described, to check it wasn't just pattern-matching a script. |
|---|---|
| Reading certificates | 60 certificates as PDFs, screenshots and phone photos, 36 of them with problems. All 60 read correctly across every finding, and no certificate with missing or contradictory pages was ever reported as clear. |
| Safety ratings | 96 hand-checked lookups with no incorrect star ratings. Where two versions of a model overlap in a year, the app shows both rather than picking one. |
These are our own tests on our own material, which is a real limit on what they prove. Anything that turns out to be wrong in the real world gets added to them.
If it gets something wrong
Tell us: [email protected]. A misread listing or certificate is worth more to us than a compliment — it becomes a test case, and the test set is the only thing stopping the same mistake happening to the next person.