Contact-free car selling – how Motorway is keeping sellers and buyers safe

The coronavirus pandemic has caused changes to every UK industry in the past couple of months, and the car trade is no different. Since lockdown restrictions were put in place, it’s not been possible to sell your car easily, with dealerships closing their doors, and car transactions deemed non-essential.

To adhere to the lockdown restrictions and ensure the safety of all our customers and staff, Motorway decided to pause trading for the duration of the March to May 2020 lockdown. 

There’s now light at the end of the tunnel. As all of us in the car industry see restrictions lifting, Motorway has been working hard behind the scenes to ensure that when we help our customers buy and sell cars, we do so in a safe, responsible way – and still make sure everyone gets the best possible deal.

This post outlines how we’re ensuring the safety of all our car sellers and buying partners for the challenging months ahead.

A good deal is now a safe deal

Before coronavirus, a great deal on a car meant three things: the right price, a quick process, and minimum hassle for all involved. Since 2017, Motorway has been helping people achieve this by bringing all the best buyers together in one place, providing instant offers to sellers of every kind of car, and making sure buyers are connected to the right seller, instantly.

Now, with the coronavirus pandemic continuing to affect all of us for the foreseeable future, we need to add the safety of sellers and buyers as a key factor in every offer we present.

Contact-free transactions for everyone

We have worked with every buyer on the Motorway platform – from online buyers, to major dealer groups and independent dealerships, to ensure they can all buy cars from sellers in a compliant, contact-free process.

We will now only show deals on Motorway where we know the buyer is able to transact in this way. To make this extra clear, we have outlined the detail of each buyer’s guidelines where we can, with links to more information where available.

Motorway’s contact-free code of conduct

For individual car dealers on our Motorway Pro auction platform, we’ve put together a Code of Conduct, which everyone has to adhere to in order to buy from our sellers. 

This ensures that the collection will happen according to a strict set of guidelines to protect both the buyer and the seller. You can read this Code of Conduct here.

Making contact-free easy: free transport for every buyer

We know that contact-free vehicle transport poses challenges for some buyers, particularly those that don’t have big in-house logistics teams. We want to support our dealers through this transition, and further ensure the safety of everyone involved. 

So, we are going to be paying for the transport and inspection element on behalf of dealers, for two car purchases for each dealer in the first few weeks after restrictions are lifted. See details of the offer here.

Having two free inspections and collections will provide our dealers a great springboard to get back to trading with one of the biggest cost and hassle removed.

Our team has worked closely with our logistics partner, We Deliver Cars, to offer a consistent, safe process to everyone, and make that as easy as possible for every buyer to get started. And we’re doing this at no cost to the buyer for their first two purchases through Motorway after restrictions are lifted. 

We have thousands of buyers on the Motorway platform to support, so this is a big investment for us. But we felt it was our responsibility to help get the car trade moving again in a safe way, support our buyers and sellers, and do so as quickly as possible.

Getting back to business

This has been a challenging year for every business in the UK. We have been working harder than ever to release lots of great improvements to the platform, make it easier than ever to sell a car, and for dealers to acquire the best stock online. 

We are looking forward to pushing service levels in the industry to new heights as we enter the new normal.

If you have any questions about our service, or how you can ensure your safety when you sell your car, feel free to email our team at any time.