Build date proof › Europe
EU registration certificate (V5C, carte grise, Zulassungsbescheinigung, libretto)
States first registration, not manufacture. First registration is normally later than the build - sometimes by more than a year. That gap is the whole problem.
- covers
- Any European vehicle
- issuer
- The national registration authority
- cost
- -
- time
- -
No date of manufacture
Carries no date of manufacture. Useful for other things; useless for proving a car's age.
What you have to supply
-
Limits and gaps
Council Directive 1999/37/EC, Annex I, defines the harmonised codes. (B) is the date of first registration and (I) the date of the current registration. There is no harmonised code for date of manufacture anywhere in the annex.
Notes
Individual member states may add national fields the directive does not harmonise, so check your own document. But no EU-wide manufacture-date field exists.
Checked against the issuer's own page issuer page · retrieved 25 September 2026
The Build Date Proof Pack
This page tells you which document to order. The pack gets it ordered — and tells you what to do when the answer is that no document exists.
- A ready-to-send request for every archive, in the language it wants
- Exactly which numbers to photograph, and where they are on the car
- What to ask the seller for before you pay the deposit
- The fallback ladder when the manufacturer has no records
- What US, Canadian and Australian officials each accept as proof