CarsXE Developer

Latency & Regions

Lower request latency from Europe with the EU endpoint, plus connection-reuse and caching tips that apply globally.

The CarsXE API is hosted in the United States (Iowa, us-central1). For customers based in the US this is already low-latency. For customers in Europe, every request would otherwise pay a transatlantic round-trip on top of the actual processing time — typically 80–150 ms before the request even reaches our servers.

This page describes how to keep that overhead off your hot path.

Use the EU endpoint from Europe

Internationally relevant endpoints — the photo-based recognition APIs, the multi-country plate decoder, and the international VIN decoder — are also available in europe-west1 (Belgium). There are two equivalent ways to reach the EU deployment; pick whichever is easier to configure in your client.

eu-api.carsxe.com (regional hostname)

Swap the hostname; keep the path identical to the US form. The EU hostname terminates in GCP europe-west1 and proxies straight to the EU function deployment.

Request

GET
/v1/international-vin-decoder
curl -G https://eu-api.carsxe.com/v1/international-vin-decoder \
    -d key=CARSXE_API_KEY \
    -d vin=WF0MXXGBWM8R43240

Endpoints available in EU

The EU deployment covers the APIs whose data is meaningful outside the US:

  • /platedecoder, /v2/platedecoder — multi-country plate decoder
  • /platerecognition — plate recognition from photos
  • /v1/international-vin-decoder — non-US VIN decoder
  • /v1/vinocr — VIN OCR from photos
  • /images — vehicle image search

Other product endpoints (/specs, /marketvalue, /v1/recalls, /history, /v1/lien-theft, /v1/ymm, /obdcodesdecoder, etc.) are US-only — call them on https://api.carsxe.com/... without the /eu prefix. Requesting a US-only path on eu-api.carsxe.com returns 404.

ErrorsCar Parking and Valet