Driver story

Mo, PCO Prius, enquiry to collection in three hours.

An 11am enquiry, a 1pm offer, a 2pm collection. The mileage barely moved the number, and the price held exactly as quoted.

Mo, London

I'd been driving the same Prius for four years. Three rides a day, six days a week, and the meter had crept past 180,000 miles. Every time I checked the instant-quote sites the number got smaller. The algorithm seemed to penalise the mileage hard. I'd written it off as something I'd have to sell privately and take what I could get.

I submitted the reg and mileage one morning around 11am. By 1pm I had a real person on the phone. He'd already looked at the MOT history, asked me about a couple of advisories from the last test, and confirmed the plate status with TfL while we were talking. The number he gave me felt fair. He explained how he'd got there: what they'd resell it for in the trade, the assumptions he was working from on condition.

I told him the bumper had a scuff and the boot lining was tired. He didn't drop the offer for that. He just said: that's what the assumption-band covers. As long as nothing bigger showed up on the day, the number held.

“He didn't drop the offer for the scuff or the tired boot lining. That's what the assumption-band covers, he said — as long as nothing bigger shows up on the day.”
Mo, London

They collected by 2pm. The driver checked the things I'd flagged, signed the paperwork, and the bank transfer cleared before he'd driven off. I'd half-expected the price to get chipped at the kerb the way friends had warned me. It didn't.

If anything, the part that took me by surprise was how little the mileage moved the number. The team treats a working Prius as a working asset, not a write-off. That's the bit you don't get from a generalist quote.

By the numbers