Carwow Sell My Car

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Selling a car through Carwow costs the seller £0. There is no listing fee, no admin charge and nothing to pay for collection, and the car goes into one of Carwow's daily online auctions in front of what its own sell-my-car page calls “6,000+ trusted dealers”. Figures checked 17 October 2026 against Carwow's consumer pages, its dealer help centre, its terms of use and Companies House.

The money has to come from somewhere, and Carwow is more open than most about where. Its trade-facing auction page tells dealers that “Buyers fees start from as little as £199” with “no subscription”, and that its payment service, Carwow Wallet, is “Free when you use it, and free when you don't”. The dealers placing those bids have taken 345,000 vehicles off the platform since the auctions launched in 2021, and Carwow puts the current flow at 22,000-plus fresh cars a month, measured as the monthly average from August 2025 to July 2026. A seller who knows the winning dealer owes £199 or more on top of the hammer price reads that bid rather better than one who does not.

Two rules decide whether you can use the service at all, and both are published before you start. Carwow will not auction a car that has been a service vehicle — it names ambulances and taxis — or an insurance write-off. It will auction a car with finance still on it, and the buying dealer settles that finance “at no cost to you, the seller”, but where the winning bid falls short of the settlement figure “you will have to cover any shortfall yourself”. No age limit, mileage limit or condition threshold appears anywhere on the consumer pages.

The £199 nobody tells the seller about, and why it still matters

A free service for one side of a transaction is paid for by the other, and Carwow publishes its half of that arithmetic where most marketplaces do not: on carwow.co.uk/partners/auctions, written for the trade. Dealers are told buyer's fees “start from as little as £199” and are “on average 5% cheaper than our closest competitor”, that there is “no subscription”, and that Carwow Wallet settles “the seller, finance house and buyer's fees” in a single transfer at no charge. Bidding runs on an automatic proxy: “You only ever pay £1 over the next highest bid, and it never goes past your limit.”

None of that is hidden and none of it is improper. It does change how a bid should be read. A dealer working out the most it can pay for your car subtracts its own costs first, and the £199-plus fee is one of them, alongside transport, preparation and the margin it needs on resale. The seller sees a single number on a screen; the dealer sees that number plus its fee. On a £5,000 car a £199 fee is four pence in every pound of the bid.

The same trade pages price a risk the private seller cannot buy cover against at all. Carwow BuySafe costs “just £59 per vehicle”, covers “3,000 mechanical and electrical parts, including all internal engine and gearbox components” up to “£7,500”, and pays out “within 48 hours of invoice receipt”. Carwow's own survey of dealers, published 1 October 2024, found that “96% of dealers have bought cars that later required major repairs”, something it says “typically affects 20% of sourced stock”. For £59 the buyer can insure itself against your car. You get no equivalent, and no ombudsman, if the deal goes wrong in the other direction.

Your reserve price is Carwow's suggestion, built on a rival's data

The consumer pages describe the reserve as “the amount you'd be happy to sell your car for”. The dealer help centre, in an article dated 13 July 2026, is fuller and more interesting: Carwow “propose a Reserve Price that aligns with real-time market value”, based on the vehicle's appraisal and Auto Trader retail data, and defines it as “the minimum price both Carwow and the seller have agreed the vehicle can be listed for before auction”. Cars that do not meet Carwow's price guidelines never enter the auction.

Two things follow that no competitor page sets out. The first is that the floor under your car is calculated by Carwow from a competitor's retail index, and you agree to it rather than name it. The second is that the published mechanics are precise enough to work out what your reserve really buys you. A bid at or above the reserve with nothing else above the reserve “will win the listing at the Reserve Price” — not at the bidder's maximum. Where two bids clear it, the higher wins, and the proxy steps up in £1 increments. Where two identical maximum bids land on the reserve, “the first bid received will win”. Carwow also sets a Minimum Bid Amount per vehicle, below which no bid may be entered at all, and reserves the right “to refuse or remove bids and/or suspend, cancel or extend listings at our absolute discretion”.

Miss the reserve and the car is not sold, but it is not finished either. The best offer is “presented to you as the highest offer and you will have the opportunity to accept or relist into the next available auction”; the trade side calls that the holding pen, with the highest offering dealer, and lets a dealer add an Increase Offer or buy outright at the asking price. Carwow shows an unsold car “for two additional days”, after which it is “tagged as ‘unsold' and will be taken off the platform”. You can “end a listing at any time without prior notification to the bidders”, which is a genuine and unusual freedom — most auction terms bind the seller once bidding opens.

What the terms say happens when the dealer is standing on your drive

This is the part of a sell-side deal that decides whether the number you accepted is the number you bank, and Carwow publishes it. “The car buyer or their agent or our collection company will inspect your car prior to the transfer of payment.” The buyer “shall be entitled to withdraw its bid if upon inspection the information or photos disclosed by you in your listing was incomplete or inaccurate”, or if you have “engaged in fraudulent or misleading behaviour (and no price adjustment can be agreed)”, or where “there is outstanding finance which has not been fully disclosed”, or if the car “fails the test drive”. Four named grounds, published in advance, is a better disclosure than a general discretion to re-price.

And the sentence that matters most to a seller is in your favour: “You do not have to accept an amended purchase price.” Set that beside the obligation running the other way — sellers agree “to sell the car once the bid is successful in accordance with these terms of use” — and the balance is clearer than on most platforms. The collection itself is free to you because the car “must be collected from you directly at the buyer's sole cost”.

Three limits sit alongside it. Carwow “does not purchase any vehicles itself, nor does it acquire any risk or title to any vehicle”; “Carwow is not party to this contract of sale”, which the buyer may ask you to sign on its own paper; and the company “shall have no liability in the event that payment is made by the car buyer but the car is not delivered or is not as described”, adding that it is “not obliged to assist in any disputes between sellers and bidders or car buyers”. Payments made through Carwow Wallet are “processed by Airwallex” into the bank account you nominate. The terms also warn, sensibly, that outside the document collection service “no bank or other financial details should be shared via our site”.

Finance, the V5C, and the three clocks you are running against

Selling a financed car through Carwow turns on a settlement letter, and the requirements are specific: the name on it must match the car's V5C, and it must have “at least 7 days remaining” when the dealer collects. Carwow's own guidance adds the two figures a reader needs to plan around — a lender must provide a settlement figure “within 12 days” of being asked, and the letter is “typically valid for 10 days”. The buying dealer settles the agreement on collection, you keep “any surplus cash from the sale once the remaining finance amount has been settled”, and you fund any negative equity yourself. Carwow says it accepts cars with outstanding finance without naming which agreement types qualify, so a lease or a personal contract hire is worth a telephone call before you list.

The third clock is statutory and nothing to do with Carwow. Regulation 22 of the Road Vehicles (Registration and Licensing) Regulations 2002 requires a registered keeper selling to a private buyer to hand over the new keeper's slip and “forthwith deliver the remainder of the registration document to the Secretary of State”, completed with the buyer's name and address, the date of sale and signed declarations from both parties. Failing to comply with a regulation made under the Vehicle Excise and Registration Act 1994 is an offence under section 59(1) of that Act, punishable on summary conviction at “level 3 on the standard scale” where the Secretary of State has prescribed it as such and “level 2 on the standard scale” otherwise — £1,000 and £500 respectively. Which level attaches to regulation 22 depends on what has been prescribed, and that could not be established from the legislation pages; the widely repeated “£1,000 fine” is the level 3 maximum rather than a figure the regulations themselves state. Selling to a dealer through Carwow puts the car into trade hands, which is a different branch of the same regulations, so the practical advice stands either way: notify DVLA the day the car leaves, and keep the acknowledgement.

Who owns the auction, and who owns the reviews

Carwow Ltd is company 07103079, incorporated on 12 December 2009 under the name Digital Blurb Limited and renamed on 4 December 2015. Its registered office is 2nd Floor, Verde Building, 10 Bressenden Place, London SW1E 5DH, and its SIC codes are 58142, publishing of consumer and business journals and periodicals, and 62090, other information technology service activities. The publishing code is not an accident. In February 2024 Carwow bought Autovia, bringing Auto Express, Carbuyer, evo and DrivingElectric — and the Driver Power owner satisfaction survey — into the group, for an undisclosed sum, reaching “over 15 million car owners, buyers and enthusiasts every month”. Carwow's own release said the titles would be retained and named the opportunity: “embedding Carwow's e-commerce offering” across them.

It is also authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority “for credit broking and insurance distribution activities (firm reference number: 767155)”, and the group discloses that Carwow and Carwow Leasey Limited “may receive a commission from partners (including dealers) for introducing customers”. Publishing the firm reference is worth crediting: the comparable page on this site for a rival marketplace could establish no FCA permission at all.

The most recent corporate news is a retrenchment dressed, fairly, as focus. On 25 August 2026 Carwow Group and mobile.de announced “a definitive agreement for mobile.de to acquire Carwow Germany”, with terms undisclosed, subject to regulatory clearance, and with Carwow.de taking “a perpetual licence to use the Carwow brand rights in Germany” on completion. Chief executive John Veichmanis said the deal “allows us to sharpen our focus as we continue to innovate and accelerate our growth in the UK and Spain”. For a British seller that is good news: the UK is now one of two markets rather than one of three.

On the numbers, the newest figures Carwow itself has published are for 2024, in a release dated 29 September 2025: group revenue up 55% to £85.1m from £54.8m, an adjusted EBITDA loss narrowing to £6.7m, headcount from 338 to 509, and “over 75,000 cars sold, generating £1.1bn Gross Merchandise Value” through Sell My Car. Group accounts for the year to 31 December 2025 were filed at Companies House on 1 October 2026, running to 61 pages; the document would not open to this check and Carwow has issued no results release to go with it, so the 2024 figures above are the latest the company stands behind in public.

The market your car is being bid into

Two official datasets tell a seller more about timing than any valuation tool. The Department for Transport's vehicle licensing statistics for April to June 2026, published 23 September 2026, count 42.9 million licensed vehicles in the UK, up 1.5% on a year earlier, of which 34,888,140 were road-using cars at the end of the quarter. Zero emission vehicles reached 2,313,000, up 30.7%, taking 5.4% of all licensed vehicles, a gain of 1.2 percentage points; 2,017,093 of those are cars, which is 5.8% of the road-using car fleet. An electric car is still an unusual thing on a dealer's forecourt, and that is reflected in how confidently it gets bid for.

The second is the price direction. The ONS series for second-hand cars within CPIH, released 16 September 2026, shows an annual rate of -2.5% in August 2026, having run at +0.4% in March, -0.4% in April, -0.6% in May, -1.2% in June and -1.9% in July. Five consecutive months of deepening falls in what buyers actually pay is an argument for selling sooner rather than holding on for a better quarter, and it is the opposite of the picture the used market showed in 2024.

Against that, Carwow's own throughput looks healthy: 22,000-plus fresh vehicles a month in the daily auctions on the August 2025 to July 2026 average, auctions running Monday to Saturday, and 345,000 cars collected since 2021. Depth of bidding is the one thing a seller cannot create and cannot verify, and volume is the best available proxy for it.

Where Carwow's own pages stop agreeing with each other

The service is well documented. It is not consistently documented, and on a page about what your car is worth the inconsistencies are worth naming.

The dealer count has two values. The sell-my-car page and the about-us page both say “6,000+” trusted dealers. The sell-to-a-dealer page says “5,500+”, three times on one page, and the financed-car page says “5,500+” as well. Neither number is dated, and a 500-dealer gap is roughly the difference between the two figures being a year apart.

The volume figure is out by a factor of three, in Carwow's favour. The consumer pages say “Dealers like you have acquired over 100,000 vehicles with us already”. The trade auction page says 345,000 “based on volumes of actual vehicles collected since launch in 2021”. A brand understating its own scale by 245,000 cars on the pages a seller actually reads is a curious way to compete, and it is the clearest sign that the consumer copy is not being refreshed as often as the trade copy.

Same-day payment is a feature on one page and a tendency on another. The sell-my-car page lists “Free same-day payment” as a benefit and says the dealer “can pay you there and then”. The sell-to-a-dealer page is careful: “Most payments arrive on the same day as your car is collected”, adding that “some dealers have their own policies”. The terms of use, which are what govern a dispute, require only that the buyer “must pay for your car promptly following its collection”. Three documents, three strengths of promise, and the weakest one is the binding one.

Two headline claims come without their workings. “Most Carwow sellers surveyed got an average £1,000 more vs part exchange quotes” and “Nine out of 10 people who sold their car thought” they got the price they expected or more are both presented without a sample size, a survey date or the proportion of customers reaching the £1,000 figure — the last of which is what the advertising guidance on savings claims asks for. The about-us page carries the same undated quality: “Last year we grew over 50% with nearly £3 billion worth of cars bought on our site” has sat there across at least two financial years.

And there is no ombudsman at the end of any of it. Carwow's FCA permissions cover credit broking and insurance distribution; buying and selling a used car is not a regulated activity, so a dispute over the sale of your car falls outside the Financial Ombudsman Service, outside the motor industry's purchase-side codes, and back onto the contract you signed with the dealer. The published complaints route is the buyer first, then Carwow's support team on hello@carwow.co.uk or 0204 586 4000, and after that the county court.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 17 October 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.