How Autoentic works

Autoentic is a measurement service. Every inspection measures coating thickness on every body panel of a vehicle, compares each panel to the factory specification for that exact year, make, and model, and produces a signed record tied to the vehicle's VIN.

What Autoentic measures

Factory paint is applied by robotic spray equipment to a narrow, characteristic thickness. The resulting coating is consistent panel-to-panel and distinct between manufacturers, models, and model years. A repair — touch-up, panel repaint, or collision work — leaves a different thickness profile: a second layer of primer, basecoat, and clearcoat over the factory layer or over filler.

Autoentic takes those measurements with a Bluetooth thickness probe and an Android tablet application. Metal panels are measured with an electromagnetic probe. Non-metal panels — plastic bumpers, composite body panels — require an ultrasonic sensor, available on the All Panels service tier.

A trained technician takes multiple readings across every panel in the inspection scope. The inspection scope is set at booking and matches one of two service tiers: Metal Panels or All Panels.

How the measurement becomes a score

Each panel's readings are compared against the factory paint profile for the exact year, make, model, and color. The comparison accounts for three sources of measurement uncertainty:

• Reading consistency — how tightly clustered the probe values are on the same panel.
• Instrument calibration — the probe's known measurement tolerance.
• Natural manufacturing variance — the spread the factory itself produces across vehicles of the same build.

Each panel receives a confidence score from 0 to 100. The score is the statistical confidence that the coating on that panel is factory-applied, after all three uncertainty sources are accounted for. The per-panel scores combine into a vehicle-level Factory Originality Confidence Score — FOCS. See the glossary for the canonical definition.

The measurement framework is GUM-compliant — the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement, the standard used by ISO/IEC 17025 calibration laboratories. The scoring technology is patent-pending.

A vehicle is labeled either Autoentic Inspected or Autoentic Certified based on how the per-panel profile rolls up. The four per-panel grade names and the two vehicle-level tiers are defined in the glossary; consumer interpretation lives on What is Autoentic certification?.

From score to record

Every inspection produces a Paint Passport — a record tied to the vehicle's VIN, not to the owner. The record is cryptographically signed; any change to the contents after issue is detectable.

The record transfers automatically when the vehicle is sold: the next owner inherits the full measurement history attached to the VIN. Anyone with the VIN can verify a record. No Autoentic account is required.

For how to read a record and how to retrieve one later, see Reading your vehicle report.