UK Private Car Speed Index

Price decides speed

2.7×

A private car priced 25% or more below what similar cars usually sell for was 2.7 times as likely to be gone within a week as one priced above the usual figure: 36.0% against 13.3%. The share rises with each band of discount.

“Typical price” is Flipilo’s estimate for cars of the same model, age and mileage sold privately. 28,339 of the 42,612 cars had a valuation with enough comparable cars. Bars show the 7-day share; whiskers show the 95% interval.

Cheap and older cars move fastest

Cars under £2,000 were the quickest to go. Above £8,000 the pace settles at about one in nine within a week. Age and mileage show the same pattern: older and higher-mileage cars, which also tend to be the cheaper ones, went faster.

Fastest and slowest models

Every model with at least 300 private adverts in October, ranked by the share gone within 7 days. Volkswagen Polo led at 26.6%; Land Rover Range Rover Evoque was slowest at 10.0%. Where two whiskers overlap, the difference between those models is within the margin of error.

By make

Makes with at least 400 private adverts. Mainstream small-car brands sit at the top; premium brands, whose cars cost more, at the bottom.

How this was measured

1. Which cars. Every car first advertised by a private seller on the UK’s largest online used-car marketplace between 1 and 31 October 2026: 42,612 cars. Flipilo scans the whole market every night and new adverts every few minutes; the nightly scan ran on every night of October.
2. What counts as gone. An advert that disappeared and was confirmed removed by checking its page. Removal is not proof of sale: a seller may also withdraw a car. If the same car (same model, version, year and mileage) was advertised again by a private seller within 3 days, it was treated as the same car still for sale.
3. Why 7 and 10 days. Private adverts are bought in fixed lengths, so many expire on day 14 and day 21. Those expiries are not sales, so the index uses the first 7 and 10 days, before any advert runs out.
4. Cars still for sale. Cars still advertised on 31 October count as unsold for the time they were seen, and cars spotted a day or two after listing count from the moment we saw them (Kaplan–Meier estimate with late entry). Whiskers are 95% intervals.
5. Dealer adverts are left out. About 23% of dealer adverts removed within a week were re-advertised by a dealer within two weeks, against a chance-match rate of about 10%. Removal does not reliably mean a sale for dealers, so they are not ranked here.
6. Robustness. With a looser re-advert rule (mileage within 150 miles, up to 14 days) the headline figure is 16.4% instead of 16.8%. Price cuts are measured on cars listed 1–17 October (24,762 cars) over their first 14 days.