Terms of Service

1. What KickTyres is, and your agreement to these terms

KickTyres (“we”, “us”) is a self-service tool that helps used-car buyers in New Zealand and Australia inspect a vehicle before purchase. It provides known-fault information, guided inspection checklists, AI-assisted photo analysis, indicative valuations, and inspection reports.

By accessing or using this website, whether or not you create an account, you agree to these terms. They apply to every visitor and to any automated system, agent, or program used to access the site. If you do not agree to them, do not use the site.

2. Not professional advice. Read this carefully

KickTyres is an information tool, not a substitute for a professional pre-purchase mechanical inspection, and nothing in the service is mechanical, financial, or legal advice. Specifically:

• Risk scores, verdicts, and fault lists are based on commonly reported issues for a make, model, and year. They describe patterns, not the actual condition of the specific vehicle you are looking at.
• AI photo analysis can miss defects and can flag things that are not defects. It cannot see what a hoist, scan tool, or trained mechanic can.
• Valuations and repair-cost estimates are indicative only, generated from general market heuristics. They do not account for trim level, options, service history, or the actual condition of the vehicle.
• You are solely responsible for your purchase decision. For any significant purchase we recommend an independent professional inspection.

3. Your account

You must provide accurate details when creating an account and keep your login secure. You are responsible for activity under your account. You must be at least 16 years old to use the service.

4. Acceptable use

• Don’t scrape, crawl, spider, bulk-download, bulk-query, or use any automated means to extract content or data from this site or the service. This applies to every part of the site, including pages that are publicly reachable without an account and pages permitted by our robots.txt file. Ordinary indexing by a mainstream search engine that honours our robots.txt is the only exception.
• Don’t resell, redistribute, republish, or make available to a third party any content or vehicle data obtained from this site or the service.
• Don’t use this site or its content to train, fine-tune, evaluate, or build a machine learning model, dataset, language model, or AI system, or to develop a competing product or database. We expressly reserve our rights against text and data mining.
• Don’t upload content that is unlawful or that you don’t have the right to upload.
• Don’t attempt to bypass payment, rate limits, access controls, or security measures, and don’t place an unreasonable load on our infrastructure.
• Don’t misrepresent who or what is making a request, including by disguising an automated client as a human visitor or as a search engine.

We may block, rate-limit, challenge, or refuse access to any visitor or network that breaches this section, without notice.

5. Ownership and permitted use

All content on this site is owned by us or used under licence. That includes the text, page designs, images, and in particular our vehicle fault database and the selection, structure, and arrangement of the information in it, which is the product of our own research and is protected as a compilation under the Copyright Act 1994 and equivalent laws.

We grant you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to view and use this site to research a vehicle you are considering buying, and to keep a copy of any report you have paid for, for your own use. That licence does not permit you to copy, extract, store, redistribute, or commercially exploit any substantial part of the site or the fault database, whether in one act or by repeated smaller acts. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

6. Payments

All prices are charged in New Zealand dollars (NZD), including for Australian vehicles, and processed by Stripe. If your card is in another currency, your bank converts the amount and may add its own fee. The currency is shown alongside every price before you pay. Each purchase is a one-off tied to a single vehicle. KickTyres is not a subscription and does not bill you on a recurring basis. See our Refund Policy.

7. Vehicle data

Vehicle details in a report come from official vehicle records for the plate you enter, the information you provide, and KickTyres’ own research database. We do not guarantee that this data is complete, current, or error-free. Always verify critical details (ownership, security interests, odometer) independently, e.g. via a PPSR check.

8. Consumer guarantees

If you acquire the service for personal use in New Zealand, nothing in these terms limits your rights under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 or the Fair Trading Act 1986. If you are an Australian consumer, nothing in these terms excludes the guarantees you have under the Australian Consumer Law. If you acquire the service for business purposes, you agree the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 does not apply.

9. Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total liability for any claim arising out of the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose. We are not liable for losses arising from a vehicle purchase decision, including repair costs, diminished value, or consequential loss.

10. Changes and termination

We may update these terms; material changes will be notified in the app or by email. We may suspend accounts that breach these terms. You may close your account at any time.

11. Contact & governing law

These terms are governed by New Zealand law. Nothing in them excludes rights you cannot contract out of under the law of your own country, including the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 for New Zealand consumers and the Australian Consumer Law for Australian consumers (see section 8). Questions: support@kicktyres.com.