Programmatic Data Feed for Car Auctions & Sites

No. TheCarApi is a data and inventory API. We expose normalized search, detail, images, catalog data, and market signals. Bidding and purchasing require your own credentials with each platform.

Send your API key via X-API-Key header or Authorization: Bearer <key>. Query-string api_key is optional and only if enabled server-side. Invalid keys return 401; repeated failures lock out the IP (5 fails / 5 min → 15 min lockout).

Always use site_slug + auction_id (e.g. auto1/48291033). Numeric-only legacy IDs can collide across sources and return HTTP 409 on ambiguous endpoints.

Public inventory is 1M+ live vehicles across Auto1, OpenLane, Schadeautos, Copart DE, eCarsTrade, Encar and the Japanese auction houses. Full indexed history exceeds 5M vehicles with 500K+ archived for historical / delta products. The 9.8M European retail classifieds listings are counted separately — they are a market-reference dataset, not auction inventory.

It is 9.8M retail listings gathered from 681 classifieds portals, dealer sites and manufacturer stock pages across 39 European countries — asking prices, not auctions. Because those rows have no bidding, no auction end date, no detail payload and no gallery (one remote thumbnail per listing), they live in their own tables with their own vocabulary (seller type, origin portal). They are never merged into /api/search and never appear in /api/sites. Query them at /api/theparking/listings, /api/theparking/facets and /api/theparking/models under the theparking scope.

Yes. eCarsTrade behaves like every other auction source: it is a valid site value for /api/search, /api/auction/{site}/{id}, /api/car-details, and the import calculator site_name fee model. Detail payloads are full; the gallery arrives under the ImageUrls key of car_identification.

Use the vehicle_details block on /api/auction/{site}/{id} and /api/car-details. Each auction house names the same concepts differently — a downloadable file is Documents[] on Auto1 but ECarsTradeDocuments[] on eCarsTrade, while Documents on OpenLane is a dict of paperwork booleans and not a file list at all — so vehicle_details normalizes condition, documents, inspection reports, service history, equipment, warranty, specs and location into one shape. Coverage is not uniform: eCarsTrade has no per-panel damage list upstream, OpenLane publishes no document files, and only eCarsTrade has per-visit service rows. Reports are always links, never proxied files. Raw per-source data stays in car_identification.

Because those figures are quoted to our buyer account and our delivery address, not yours — OpenLane gates them behind per-account visibility flags, Auto1 prices routes from our merchant profile, eCarsTrade quotes to our warehouse. Publishing them next to a public price would also expose our markup by subtraction. Fee, bid-history, transport and delivery blocks are stripped at the response boundary, along with anything identifying our account on a platform. Still served: the auction house’s own published asking prices, VAT scheme, estimated repair cost, and the seller/warehouse location. For landed cost, use the import calculator, which prices your own route.

Prices are live across every source. All seven auction sources are refreshed continuously rather than on a slow batch schedule, so whatever you read — a search card, a facet count, a top-offer row, a detail response — is a current figure. There is no stale tier and no premium real-time upgrade; live pricing is the baseline for everything. On top of that baseline, a running auction with open bidding gets a second refresh: open one on a detail endpoint and the API re-reads its current bid from the auction house while serving your request, attaching a live_price block. An absent live_price block therefore never means a stale price — it means that listing did not need the second refresh. Read live_prices from /api/contract rather than hardcoding which listings qualify.

Yes, in two clearly separated fields. co2 is the measured figure the auction house published, present on roughly half of EU lots. co2_estimated is derived for lots that publish none, and is never a measured value — an estimate must not be able to masquerade as a measurement. Because EU registration documents switched from NEDC to WLTP on 1 January 2021 and the same car reads 12-25% higher under WLTP, every estimate ships with co2_estimated_standard telling you which cycle it is on. Estimates are EU-market sources only: Korean, Japanese and American lots are homologated on different cycles, so no EU figure exists for them.

No, and this is worth checking before you scope a feature. Auto1, OpenLane and eCarsTrade publish deep condition data; Schadeautos, Copart and Encar are moderate; the Japanese auction feed is shallow and its vehicle_details is often sparse or absent. Only eCarsTrade has per-visit service history rows. Only Auto1 has paint measurements and the DAT equipment catalogue. OpenLane publishes no document files at all, only paperwork booleans. The common core — identity, make/model/year, fuel, gearbox, mileage, prices, steering, images — is consistent everywhere. The Fields by source page in the documentation carries the full coverage matrix.

Yes. Listings include thumbnail annotations when ready. Full galleries via GET /api/auction-images/{site}/{id} return ready WebP vault/CDN URLs. 50M+ images are processed in the vault (~5 TB).

Standard responses emphasize clean cross-source fields (make, model, year, fuel, mileage, public_price_eur, damage flags). Premium access includes car_identification and other JSONB blobs with source-specific damages, equipment, and reports.

Config supports RATE_LIMIT_PER_MINUTE (default 100). Brute-force protection on bad keys is active. Contact us for production quotas and multi-tenant key plans on the roadmap.

Archived vehicles (full field fidelity + archived_at) power historical and delta products — 500K+ archive depth. Archive access and lifecycle fields (first_seen_at, content_hash, last_changed_at) are included in the plan.