What is Autoentic certification?
Autoentic measures how thick the paint is on every body panel of your vehicle, compares each panel to the factory specification for that exact make, model, and year, and turns the result into a score you can share. This page explains what the score means and how the grades work.
What Autoentic measures
When a vehicle leaves the factory, its paint is applied by robotic spray equipment to a narrow, characteristic thickness — consistent panel to panel, and distinct between manufacturers, models, and even model years. That factory layer is the reference.
When a panel is later repaired — after a parking-lot ding, a collision, rust repair, or a full repaint — the new paint is almost always thicker. It has to be: the repair shop applies primer, basecoat, and clearcoat in layers, and the result sits on top of either the original factory layer or filler below. A modern thickness probe can detect that extra material through the surface without touching or damaging the finish.
Autoentic uses a Bluetooth thickness probe — the same class of instrument used by professional paint protection film installers and automotive auction inspectors — to take readings across every body panel. Each reading is compared against the factory paint profile for your specific year, make, and model.
What your report tells you
Every report shows three things, all delivered by email to whoever booked the inspection:
- A confidence score from 0 to 100 that summarises how certain Autoentic is about your vehicle's paint.
- A per-panel grade — one of four labels — for every panel that was measured.
- A shareable record tied to the VIN. The record is signed and tamper-evident; a buyer or dealer can verify it without an Autoentic account.
The score is a confidence measure, not a quality grade. It says how certain the measurement is, after accounting for natural variation in the readings, in the instrument's calibration, and in how the factory itself applies paint from one vehicle to the next. A score of 87 doesn't mean "87 % factory original" — it means high confidence that the paint is factory.
Grades are descriptive, not judgmental
Your Autoentic grade describes what the paint is, not whether the vehicle is "good" or "bad". Refinished doesn't mean damaged or poorly repaired — it means the paint on that panel isn't exactly what the factory applied.
The four per-panel grades
Each measured panel gets exactly one of these four labels. Definitions are short on purpose — the glossary has the canonical one-line entries.
How a vehicle earns Inspected vs Certified
The four grades above describe individual panels. The vehicle as a whole earns one of two tiers:
- Autoentic Inspected is earned the moment every panel in your paid scope has been measured — regardless of result. Inspected documents that your vehicle was measured. A vehicle with one Refinished panel and the rest Factory Original is still Autoentic Inspected.
- Autoentic Certified is the stricter tier. It is earned only when every measured panel scored as Factory Original. Certified comes in two scopes that match the service tier you booked: Metal Panels (every metal body panel factory original) and All Panels (every panel — metal and plastic — factory original).
Both tiers live in the same record, tied to the same VIN, and transfer automatically when the vehicle is sold. The next owner inherits the full measurement history — no transfer paperwork, no re-registration.
For a walkthrough of every section of an actual report — how to interpret your score, your per-panel grades, and how to find your record again later — see Reading your vehicle report.