Motorway vs Arnold Clark: which is the best place to sell my car?
We compared dozens of car valuations at Motorway and Arnold Clark to see who offered the best price.
Motorway vs Arnold Clark: which is the best place to sell my car?
The short answer to that question is that it depends very much on the specifics of your motor.
Now, we appreciate that’s not the most useful of answers, so we thought we’d do some research of our own to see how Arnold Clark compared to Motorway (you can see more of our car-buying site comparisons here).
We requested a bunch of quotes from each company for some of the most popular cars to see how they compared*.
So who pays the best price between Arnold Clark and Motorway, according to our research?
Sell my car comparison: Motorway vs Arnold Clark
| Land Rover | Tesla Model 3 | Ford Fiesta | Ford Focus | Mini | Nissan Qashqai | VW Golf | Mercedes A Class | AVERAGE | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Motorway | £23,705 | £41,697 | £4,629 | £6,083 | £15,884 | £15,879 | £12,315 | £8,452 | £16,081 |
| Arnold Clark | £21,392 | £39,635 | £3,921 | £5,625 | £14,844 | £14,433 | £11,739 | £7,630 | £14,902 |
In total, we requested roughly five valuations each for eight different types of car.
As you can see in the table above, Motorway offered the highest average in all eight scenarios.
When we looked at the average price for every car we valued (see final column, above), Motorway’s quotes were on average £1,100 higher than Arnold Clark’s.
Interestingly, Motorway’s big claim is that they pay £1,000 more than their car-buying rivals, so our – admittedly small – survey suggests they are more than delivering on this.
However, that doesn’t mean Motorway is definitely the better place to sell your car.
Why no car-buying site is ALWAYS best
That might seem like an odd thing to say given all we’ve just said in the previous section, but the fact of the matter is no site will offer the best price for every car.
As a case in point, when we were compiling our five quotes for each car type, there were very few instances where Motorway offered the best price for all five.
There was usually at least one example where Arnold Clark quoted a higher price.
That’s why we made the point at the start about it really coming down to the specifics of your individual motor.
Sell my car online: alternatives to Motorway and Arnold Clark
So with all this in mind, it’s vital you don’t simply assume a certain car-buying site is definitely going to be the best.
Take some time to source quotes from a few places (it’s probably worth setting up a new email address to do this as you’re likely to end up with a lot of emails in your inbox).
There are many car-buying sites out there that will offer you a quote from in a few minutes:
Read our Cazoo review or get a quote
Read our Wewantanycar review or get a quote
Read our Evans Halshaw review or get a quote
Read our Webuyanycar review or get a quote
Read our Money4yourmotors review or get a quote
Read our Motorway review or get a quote
Read our Arnold Clark review or get a quote
Read our Carwow review or get a quote
Motorway vs Arnold Clark: fees and collection?
If you do decide to sell to either Arnold Clark or Motorway, the good news is neither will charge you any fees for doing so.
However, Motorway do have the edge because they also offer free home collection, whereas you’ll have to drive to one of Arnold Clark’s inspection centres if you want to sell through them.
So, if the two companies are offering you pretty similar sums, that may tip things in favour of Motorway.
Motorway vs Arnold Clark comparison: customer service
The final thing to consider when comparing car-buying services is the quality of service you can expect.
While there’s always an element of luck depending on the specific person/people you have to deal with at a company, it’s useful to take a look at the Trustpilot ratings to see what level of service they generally offer.
In truth, there’s not much to choose between the two here: Motorway has a rating of 4.6 out of 5, while Arnold Clark is marginally lower at 4.5.
These are both excellent ratings, so you should feel confident of getting a decent level of service whichever you choose.
*Methodology: we requested an online quote for 39 different cars across 8 different car makes. This works out to five car quotes per car with the exception of the Mercedes A Class, for which we only got four quotes.