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.
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.
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.
curl -G https://eu-api.carsxe.com/v1/international-vin-decoder \
-d key=CARSXE_API_KEY \
-d vin=WF0MXXGBWM8R43240The 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 searchOther 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.