How to delete a vehicle
📝 Beta article — this article is part of our new help center. If a step doesn’t match what you see in Movcar, let us know — we’re refining the content daily.
⚠ Read this first — deleting a vehicle is permanent and breaks the link between past records (refuellings, claims, mileage, routes, handovers, service operations) and the vehicle they belong to. For vehicles that simply leave your fleet (sold, end of lease, written off), use archive instead — see How to archive and restore a vehicle. Delete is for: test records you no longer want, mis-typed duplicates, or genuine GDPR data-removal requests where you must purge the record from your system.
Step 1 — Open Vehicles
My Fleet → Vehicles. Find the vehicle to delete via search or scrolling.
Step 2 — Click the trash icon
At the right end of the row, click 🗑. Movcar shows a confirmation modal.
Alternatively, open the vehicle’s detail view and click Delete Item? in the top-right action bar.
Step 3 — Confirm
Click Delete. The vehicle is removed from the database and a green confirmation toast appears in the bottom-right.
What gets deleted
| Affected | Notes |
|---|---|
| The vehicle record itself | Gone — no recovery without a database restore. |
| Past refuellings | Stay, but the Vehicle column shows the license plate as removed or empty. |
| Past mileage entries | Same. |
| Past routes | Same — the Vehicle attribution is severed. |
| Past claims | Same. |
| Past handover protocols | Same — historical PDFs stay valid, but the live link breaks. |
| Service operations and visits | Same. |
| Documents stored against the vehicle | Also deleted. Make sure you’ve kept any compliance copies elsewhere. |
| App Connection Code | If the vehicle was paired to a driver app, the link is removed. |
| Fuel card link | The link is removed. The fuel card itself stays. |
Why archive is usually better
Archiving (Status = Archived) achieves the practical goal — the vehicle disappears from the active list — without breaking the historical link. Year-end reports, P&L, and fuel-consumption analysis still attribute past activity to the right vehicle.
Use delete only when you have a specific reason the record shouldn’t exist at all.
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