SERMI Explained: Who Can Legally Access Your Car's Data

SERMI comes up whenever people talk about the “right to repair”, and it is almost always half-explained. The short version: SERMI is about letting trusted independent garages work on the security systems of modern cars. It is not a way to see a car’s service history — yours or anyone else’s. That distinction matters, because the confusion sends people down the wrong path when they’re trying to trace a maintenance record.

What SERMI is

SERMI stands for the Security-Related Repair and Maintenance Information scheme. It is a European framework that lets accredited independent operators reach the security-related data a car needs for certain jobs — programming a new key, working with the immobiliser, or accessing protected control-unit functions — through the manufacturer’s own portal. Access is gated: an operator is vetted, granted a credential, and can then request that specific class of data.

The point is balance. Modern cars hold anti-theft systems that you would not want exposed to anyone. But independents still need to fix them, and competition law says they should be able to. SERMI is the compromise: sensitive data, but only for operators who have been checked.

What SERMI is not

Here is the part that trips people up. SERMI does not give a garage — or you — access to a car’s service history. The two things live in completely different places:

• Security data (keys, immobiliser): governed by SERMI-style access, available to vetted operators for specific jobs.
• Service history (the record of what work was done, when and by whom): held in the manufacturer’s dealer management system, keyed to the VIN, and generally readable only by the franchised network and the owner’s own account.

So an independent garage can legitimately cut you a new key without ever being able to see whether the car’s cambelt was changed. The right-to-repair rules that underpin SERMI are about the technical repair and maintenance information a garage needs to do the work — not the individual car’s maintenance ledger.

Where the UK stands

SERMI is an EU scheme, phased in across the bloc from 2023. Since Brexit, the UK is not part of the EU’s SERMI accreditation, and the domestic arrangements for security-related access are set separately and continue to evolve. What has not changed is the underlying principle: independents in the UK retain the right to the technical information needed to service and repair vehicles, under the Motor Vehicle Block Exemption, even though the exact mechanism for the most sensitive security data differs from the EU model.

For a car owner, the practical effect is the same on both sides of the Channel: the framework decides who can touch your security systems, not who can read your service history. Treat any claim that “SERMI lets a garage pull your full history” as a red flag — it doesn’t work that way.

So who can actually see your service history?

Strip away the confusion and the list is short:

• You, through the manufacturer’s owner portal — if the car has one, and if the history it exposes goes beyond reminders. Our manufacturer pages note which portals show real history and which only show what’s due next.
• A franchised dealer, who can retrieve the record by VIN. Whether they will do so for a non-owner, and whether they charge, is covered in our guide to what dealers charge to print records.
• An aggregated report, which pulls the franchised-network data together against the VIN — useful when you don’t own the car or don’t want a dealer visit.

Independent garages, for all their legitimate access to repair data, are generally not on that list. That is the single most useful thing to understand about SERMI: it is a repairer’s tool, not a records service.

Read next

For the primary source, the official SERMI scheme site (sermi.eu) sets out how accreditation works. To see how a specific brand handles owner and independent access, open its page in the manufacturer index, or brush up on the vocabulary in the glossary.