Who Owns CARFAX?

CARFAX was founded in 1984 in Columbia, Missouri, by Ewin Barnett III and Robert Daniel Clark, working with the Missouri Automobile Dealers Association. The original mission was narrow: expose odometer fraud by compiling title data so dealers and buyers could check a car's reported mileage history.

The first reports were compiled and faxed manually. Through the late 1980s and 1990s the company added accident, title and service data from state DMVs, police reports, auctions and repair shops, and in 1996 moved online, letting consumers run reports by VIN for a fee. Show me the CARFAX became one of the most effective taglines in automotive advertising.

R.L. Polk and Co., the automotive data firm, acquired CARFAX in 1999 and made it the consumer face of its data estate. When IHS bought Polk for $1.4 billion in 2013, CARFAX moved with it, and the 2016 merger forming IHS Markit kept the brand inside a growing information conglomerate.

S&P Global's $44 billion merger with IHS Markit closed in February 2022, placing CARFAX inside the ratings giant's Mobility segment. By 2025 S&P Global decided the automotive business was worth more apart: it announced the Mobility spin-off in April 2025, named the new company Mobility Global in February 2026, and completed the separation on July 1, 2026.

Under its various owners the product expanded from paper reports into a platform: used-car listings, valuation tools, service-reminder apps, dealer tools and data products for lenders and insurers. The database now exceeds 30 billion records, and CARFAX reports function as a near-standard checkpoint in US used-car transactions.

The founding insight was that odometer rollback fraud and hidden damage cost used car buyers billions annually, and that a vehicle's paper trail existed but was inaccessible. CARFAX aggregated title records, inspection data and dealer reports into a single vehicle history lookup, initially sold to dealers and then directly to consumers.

The company's defining marketing moment was the "Show me the CARFAX" campaign of the 2000s, featuring the Car Fox mascot, which turned a database product into a consumer demand: buyers began asking dealers for the report by name, which in turn forced dealers to subscribe. That demand-side pull created the network effect that still protects the brand.

CARFAX.com launched in 1999 as one of the earlier direct-to-consumer data products on the web. In 2013 IHS Inc acquired the company for approximately 1.4 billion dollars, and the 2022 S&P Global-IHS Markit merger placed it inside the S&P Mobility segment. The July 1, 2026 separation made CARFAX the flagship of the newly independent Mobility Global Inc, trading on Nasdaq as MBGL.