Lost your service book: what now?

The service book was in the glovebox, and now it is not. Annoying, but rarely a disaster: the book is not the history of your car, it is only a copy of it. Most of what was in it can still be found elsewhere.

Below is what you can recover, in the order in which it is worth the effort.

Can you get a new book?

Usually yes, and usually it is of little use. Brand dealers can order a blank book, but they will not put stamps in it for services they did not carry out — and that is exactly what you are after. An empty book is not a history.

The exception is the car whose maintenance has consistently been done at one brand dealer. That dealer can often print a list from its own system of the services carried out there.

Route 1: the RDW, free

The RDW — the Dutch vehicle authority — records every APK inspection, the annual roadworthiness test, including the points a car failed on, and keeps the odometer readings taken at those inspections. That is not a maintenance history, but it comes close: you can see per year whether the car passed, what it failed on, and what the odometer read at the time.

Particularly useful is the odometer judgement (tellerstandoordeel): the RDW assesses whether the series of readings rises logically. If it says “logisch”, that is an independent indication that the odometer has not been tampered with — something no service book can tell you.

This costs nothing and can be requested by anyone at rdw.nl.

Route 2: the garages you have used

This is the route most people skip and the one that yields the most. Garages are required to keep their records for years, and an invoice for a service is a good deal more concrete than a stamp: it says what was done, which parts went in, and at what odometer reading.

Call or email the garages you know you have used and ask for copies of the invoices on your registration. That is an ordinary request that most businesses have no problem with at all. Cannot remember which garage it was? The failure points from route 1 often put you on the trail: at the very least you know in which year something had to be done.

Route 3: the manufacturer’s digital service record

Almost every manufacturer has moved from a paper book to a digital service record (often abbreviated to DSB or DSR in the Netherlands). Whatever a participating garage wrote in it is still there, even though you have lost the paper copy.

Two caveats. As a private owner you usually cannot get at it yourself; it runs through a dealer or through a service that makes the request for you, and that generally costs around fifteen euros. And what you get back differs sharply per brand: sometimes a detailed overview, sometimes no more than the observation that maintenance took place, without stating what was done. That last one is a well-known complaint on brand forums, and not something you can work around.

What you will not get back

Be realistic about this. Maintenance you did yourself, work by a specialist that is not affiliated with anything, damage you had repaired outside of your insurance: none of that is in any register. If you kept no invoices or photos of it, it is gone.

The same goes for cars imported from abroad: the Dutch registers only begin at the moment of import.

Make sure it does not happen again

Once you have collected the paperwork, the question is where you keep it. A folder in the cupboard has the same problem as the book: it can go missing, and when you sell, the buyer simply has to take your word for it.

That is what Milestamp was made for. You put the invoices you recovered into your car’s logbook, and from that moment on every service is added — entered by you, or stamped directly by your garage. When you sell, you share one link, and the whole logbook transfers to the new owner.