Following changes in your car’s value is easy with Motorway’s free, online tool.

Understanding the value of your assets and possessions has become increasingly effortless, thanks to online platforms and marketplaces such as Zoopla, which enables you to track property values, and Vinted, which suggests pricing and discounts for clothing based on real-time sales data.

Despite these advancements, a significant 41% of car owners are uncertain about the value of their vehicles, mainly due to the constant fluctuations in car prices, which don’t follow a linear trend and are hard to guess.

Whether you're a dedicated car enthusiast or simply rely on your vehicle to get around, chances are you're unsure whether its value is increasing or decreasing at any given time.

This presents a problem when you’re ready to sell your car: how do you know it’s actually a good time to sell and get your best price?

A huge proportion of motorists in the UK sell their car for less than they think it’s worth, because it’s hard to get clarity on their car’s value, and it’s intimidating to haggle over the price with your buyer.  Motorway has the answer with its Car Value Tracker, a free online tool to see monthly changes in your car’s market price and track the ongoing value of up to six vehicles at once.

Motorway is the UK’s fastest-growing used-car marketplace, connecting individuals selling their cars directly with a network of over 5,000 verified car dealers. By matching each seller with the best offer, Motorway enables you to sell your car for a great price in as little as 24 hours, with the added convenience of free home collection.

Car Value Tracker is free to use on motorway.co.uk, and provides a comprehensive view of your vehicle's value over time, displaying up to 24 months of historical pricing on an interactive graph. If you have previously valued your vehicle on Motorway, those valuations will also be included on the graph.

This allows you to observe the changes in your car's value, whether it's depreciating, maintaining its value, or even increasing in price. You can check your car's value at any time or sign up for monthly email alerts to stay informed.

What’s causing car value to change?

Used car pricing is extremely hard to predict, as cars do not depreciate at a steady or linear rate. As demand shifts, the market price used cars can fetch can increase or drop quite radically, or hold steady unexpectedly, with the owners expecting the value to have decreased.

Car Value Tracker is a first-of-its-kind product, using advanced data science techniques to leverage historic data from thousands of similar cars that have sold through the Motorway platform, and hundreds of thousands of bids from dealers, to accurately model each individual car’s valuation history.

You can see how your car’s value changes over time and get insight into how this might correspond with influences such as fuel type legislation, new car shortages, or even just the popularity or availability of your model.

Using Car Value Tracker is free and simple: just input is your reg and mileage for a live valuation. You’ll be prompted to log in or sign up for a free Motorway account, and then you’ll see your Car Value Tracker dashboard with your latest valuation, and a plotted graph with historical valuations, as well as your overall two-year change expressed as one average figure, e.g. -2.23%. Toggle  on or off the monthly email alerts reminding you to confirm your mileage for an updated valuation, depending on how closely you want to track your vehicle’s value.

Below your interactive car value graph, you’ll see the sale prices of vehicles just like yours that recently sold on Motorway. The dynamic Car Value Tracker webpage also tells you whether or not your vehicle is compliant with the UK’s Clean Air Zones such as ULEZ in Greater London. For even more personalisation, Motorway quotes the number of recent dealer bids it used to calculate your current valuation, for total transparency.

What if my car is on finance?

The perfect time to sell a car or van with outstanding finance is when you are in positive equity. This means that your vehicle’s valuation will be higher than the remaining payable balance in your finance agreement. This normally happens at least three or four years into your financing contract.

What many people don’t know is that at this point, you can sell your car with Motorway to a verified dealer, who will clear the outstanding balance with your car finance lender and pay you the surplus, straight into your bank account.

By tracking the value of your financed vehicle on Car Value Tracker, and monitoring your finance settlement as you pay off the debt, you really can choose the perfect time to sell. This free tool, exclusive to Motorway, has improved people’s understanding of their car as a financial asset, and helped them to make the most of their money.