Is Carfax at least a reliable record of how many times title has changed hands? I know it is unreliable as a record of service, but is it going to accurately show the number of previous owners?
I highly doubt it.
Just as a hoot, one time I ran 3 of the family’s cars through Carfax just to see what showed up.
My daily beater Subaru that had been on a Salvage Title for 7 or 8 years was shown to have a Clean title.
My youngest son’s Camaro was shown to have suffered a front end collision. Nope; someone broke a T-Top and attemped to steal a stereo is all it was.
The most ridiculous was showing my at the time being driven SAAB as being “currently stolen”. That was a big surprise to me, the dealer who sold it to me, and the prior Air Force officer who owned it from new. Of course I looked out in the driveway and it was still there… 
CarFakes is not a reliable indicator of ANYTHING.
They present themselves as accessing comprehensive databanks that include all the history of all cars. The truth is that no such database exists and they do NOTHING to even sample their own data for accuracy. I have long said that it’s past time that an investigative organization, perhaps a consumer protection organization, with the resources to do so investigated and reported on CarFakes. IMHO they’re misrepresenting themselves. I’ve read their disclaimers, but IMHO each CarFakes report should come with a large warning stating “WARNING - THIS DATA IS NOT BASED ON ANY FACTS AND MAY INCLUDE ERRONEOUS, INACCURATE, AND TOTALLY FALSE INFORMATION”. Sort of like the warnings on cigarette packs.
I’ve actually NOT bought a few cars, because the carfax report showed a few unfavorable things
Whether it was accurate or not, I don’t know. I felt it was better to walk away and keep looking
Another time, carfax showed that a car had several previous owners. But the car was in excellent mechanical condition. So I bought it anyways, and it’s been a very reliable car for many years. It’s now relegated to “spare car” status. But it still comes in handy. I use it on the weekends to run errands. I occasionally loan it out to relatives and/or friends when their own car is out of commission
Carfax is a tool but the issue I have with them is the promotion of the warm and fuzzy feeling being sold that the CF report knows all and the insinuation that if the CF report is clean then the car buyer is getting an A-One vehicle that has had no problems and likely never will.
Many, many people buy cars every day based on “Carfax says…”.
Is title history available as public information? Seems to me that is valuable to know when buying a vehicle yet I don’t know of any other way to get it than Carfax (and even that is not reliably accurate). I recall asking about title to a vehicle we had sold and the tax office would not reveal whether the stupid buyer had followed through with registering it in his name or not. At least we were able to file an affidavit with them evidencing that we no longer owned it; that way we would not be responsible for any of the buyer’s bad driving & parking misdeeds.
I’ve only used CF a couple times and just found it useful for knowing where the car came from, changes in title, and mileage at the time of sale. I think it is fairly accurate for that information since it comes from DMV records. The rest of it I don’t know. You can’t really get title histories from state DMVs due to privacy and cost. Also you have to know what states the car has been titled in first before checking history. So CF can be useful if free.