Car Market Data API for Europe — Starting with Poland

Data: CarDossier database, 1.4M+ Polish market listings, updated daily · Last updated: July 2026

The car data API landscape is US-centric

If you search for a "car data API" today, the established options are excellent — for North America. NHTSA vPIC is a free US government API for VIN decoding and manufacturer-reported vehicle specifications; it covers US vehicles (plus Canadian dimension data) and provides no listings or pricing at all. CarAPI offers vehicle specs and VIN decoding for the US market and most of Canada, with license plate lookups extending to parts of Europe — but its core catalog is specification data, not market prices. MarketCheck aggregates dealer inventory and listing data at serious scale, covering the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

All three are solid products doing what they were designed to do. The gap is elsewhere: if you need to know what a 2019 BMW 3 Series actually sells for on the continental European secondary market — the price distribution, how fast it sells, how much an automatic gearbox or an import history shifts the price — none of the mainstream APIs answers that question. European listing-level market data has largely stayed locked inside classified portals and enterprise data deals.

Why Poland is the right entry point for European market data

Poland is not a niche market. With roughly 37 million residents it is the fifth most populous EU member state, and it sits at the center of one of Europe's defining used-car trade flows: vehicles moving east from Germany and other Western European markets. Hundreds of thousands of used cars are imported into Poland every year, which makes the Polish secondary market an unusually informative lens on European used-car pricing — the same vehicles that trade in Munich or Rotterdam reappear in Polish listings weeks later, with the price delta visible in the data.

CarDossier's own database of 1.4M+ Polish market listings, aggregated from publicly available sources and updated daily, is the substrate for every endpoint below. Because the data is listing-level rather than registration-level, it reflects asking prices and market movement in near real time instead of lagging administrative statistics.

The five endpoints

Base URL: https://car-dossier.com/api/v1. Pricing is credit-based, 1 credit = $0.01, and failed calls are automatically refunded.

All endpoints share the same smart-matching layer: you can pass natural names like VW Golf, BMW 3 Series or 320d, C-Class, A4, or XC60, and the API resolves them to canonical make/model entries. Every response includes a matched block showing exactly what was resolved, so there is never ambiguity about what you were charged for. The fuel_type filter accepts plain English values: petrol, diesel, hybrid, electric, lpg.

Try it now — no API key required

The fastest way to evaluate the API is the keyless demo tier: 5 free calls per IP per day against live production data, no registration and no credit card. Run this in your terminal:

A typical response looks like this (values in PLN):

Note the matched block: the query said "3 Series" and the API resolved it onto the Polish marketplace naming ("Seria 3") automatically. The p25/p75 spread tells you the realistic negotiation band, and sample_size tells you how much data sits behind the estimate — a valuation built on 866 listings carries different weight than one built on 30. When you outgrow the demo tier, registration takes an email OTP (no credit card) and comes with 50 free credits; paid plans run from $49 for 5,000 credits to $699 for 100,000.

Typical use cases

• Fintech and lending risk: collateral valuation for car loans and leasing residuals, using median and percentile prices instead of a single point estimate.
• Insurance pricing: market-value inputs for total-loss settlements and premium models, refreshed daily rather than quarterly.
• Dealer pricing tools: price a trade-in against the live Polish market, and use liquidity data to avoid stocking slow-moving inventory.
• Cross-border traders: compare acquisition prices in Western Europe against Polish resale levels by region, with valuation factors quantifying how import status affects the final price.
• Market research and journalism: 24-month price trends and regional breakdowns as a citable, reproducible data source.

Coverage at a glance

Additional European markets are under evaluation; Poland is the starting point, not the end state. No launch dates are committed.

Quickstart for developers and AI agents

Everything is machine-readable by design. The full OpenAPI specification lives at car-dossier.com/openapi.yaml, and an llms.txt file describes the API for LLM-based tooling. If you are building with AI agents, there is a native MCP server: install it locally with pip install cardossier-mcp-server (it works keyless out of the box), or point your agent at the hosted endpoint https://car-dossier.com/mcp. Human-readable documentation is at /en/api/docs and full pricing at /en/api/pricing.