Why a Passport entry can never be edited

The first thing people try to do with a wrong entry is fix it. It is the obvious response and every other app allows it. Motorspree does not, and the reasoning is worth setting out plainly rather than leaving it as a limitation people discover.

The record is not written for you

A Vehicle Passport is attached to the car rather than to the person, and it outlives the current owner. That means its audience is not primarily you. It is the buyer two owners from now, the workshop diagnosing something odd, and the insurer or lender assessing what the car has been through.

Every one of those readers is asking the same question: can I rely on this? A record that any previous holder could have quietly rewritten does not answer that question. It cannot be relied on, and the fact that most people would never abuse it does not help, because the reader has no way to tell which kind of owner they are looking at.

How a correction works instead

Mistakes happen. A mistyped mileage, the wrong date, an entry on the wrong vehicle. So corrections are supported. They are just not edits.

• You add a new entry that references the original.
• The new entry says what the correct information is and, where it helps, why.
• Both remain visible. The original is marked as superseded and stays where it is, in the sequence, with its own timestamp.

So the record shows what was recorded, when, and what it was later corrected to. A reader sees the whole sequence and can judge it. This is how ledgers, medical notes and audit logs have always worked, for the same reason: the correction history is itself information.

What it costs

It would be dishonest to present this as free. The constraint has three real costs and they are worth naming.

The cost	Why it is worth paying
A typo is permanently visible	So is the correction, immediately beneath it. A reader sees a careful owner who fixed a mistake
The history gets longer	Superseded entries are marked and collapse by default; the detail is there when someone wants it
It feels unforgiving at first	It is the same property that makes your record persuasive when you come to sell

The alternative, allowing edits and keeping a private edit log, sounds like a compromise but is not one. Either the reader can see the edit history, in which case nothing has been simplified for them, or they cannot, in which case the record is back to being unverifiable.

Deletion, and the difference between a record and your data

This is where the reasoning needs care, because "you cannot delete it" and "we keep your data forever" are very different statements and only the first one is true.

The service record belongs to the car. The oil change happened; it is a fact about the vehicle and it stays with the vehicle through every owner. What is yours (your name, your contact details, your messages, your fuel spending, your locations) is not part of that record and does not transfer when you sell. Those are personal data and the ordinary rights apply to them: you can see them, correct them and have them erased.

So the Passport that reaches the next owner shows a complete maintenance history and tells them nothing about who you are or where you drove. Both halves of that sentence are deliberate.

Append-only is not the same as verified

One thing append-only does not do, and it is worth being clear so the guarantee is not oversold: it does not make an entry true. It makes it permanent.

That is why entries carry their provenance separately. A garage-verified record is one where the workshop that did the work confirmed it in Motorspree, with the date, the mileage and the parts. The booking and the confirmation both happened here, which is what makes it checkable. A self-logged entry is one you added yourself. Both appear, both are permanent, and they are labelled differently because they carry different weight.

Append-only guarantees that nobody quietly changed their mind later. Verification is what says the entry was right when it was made. A record needs both, and conflating them would be its own kind of dishonesty.

Common questions