Volkswagen Up Wins Car of the Year 2012

At this year’s What Car? awards ceremony the German car manufacturers did exceptionally well taking the overall prize as well as 10 out 16 category wins. Volkswagen’s nifty  little Up won the top prize as well as the Safety Award for its City Emergency Braking System.

Chris Hallett is What Car?’s editor-in-chief and he said: ‘

The Volkswagen Up is the best car we’ve seen this year because it combines refinement, quality, space and economy. It sets new standards for the £10,000 price bracket. It feels at home in town and copes admirably on the motorway; it is the right car for the time.’

When the time comes to start thinking about trading in your car then you will most probably have the same thoughts on the issue that most people have; where to sell my car and how to sell my car.

After all, this is not just any old deal as your car is nearly always the second most expensive purchase you will ever make, and if you don’t own a house then it will undoubtedly be the most expensive, so the “where” and the “how” are especially important to you.

Happily, we are able to help you with answers to both questions because we are nationally renowned experts in the buying and selling of vehicles online, and online car sales these days is precisely where the action is.

Basically both questions are answered if you go to our home page by clicking on sell my car and on that page you will see a form which asks for all the details of the car you are wanting to sell.

Fill all this in together with your contact details and you will be contacted by a buyer who specialises in buying your make of car and who will arrange to visit you and value it professionally.

The dealer will then make you a cash offer which, if you accept will be paid into your bank account the same day. This leaves you with an enviable pile of cash in your account so that you can happily approach a car dealer with a view to buying another vehicle without the hassle of a part exchange.

I sell my car that way every time now!

Checking on the Net one day I was quite surprised by the amount of companies stating that “We buy any car” and idly wondered how they manage to do this in such an uncertain financial climate as we have seen this last few years. I mean, how do these guys manage to pay out cash for a car when it takes the ordinary mortal ages and ages to strike a reasonable deal with a car salesman for a trade in? I wondered if I should sell my Volvo?

I later learned that this is the latest (and possibly the best) way of buying and selling cars, and it works like this:-

If you type into a search engine something like “sell my car” for instance, then you have the invariable pages upon pages of websites appear, all of which offer to buy your car for cash. You simply choose the one you think looks good and honest, fill in the online form with all your vehicle details and send it in.

The next thing you know is that you are contacted by a buyer who is an expert in your make and model of car. He makes an appointment to see you and values the car at the same time. If you take the offer then he arranges cash to be paid into your account immediately and that’s the deal done. No fuss, no mess and no hawking your vehicle round all the dealers in town trying to buy another car and being hampered by a part exchange whilst doing so.

It works, and is such a simple system that it’s a wonder nobody thought of it years ago, so the next time I want to sell my car this is the way I will do it.

Doing just a little research about selling cars threw up some quite useful information that I was unaware of prior to searching on Google, but none of the info gleaned said anything about the latest method of sellingg online, you know, where you see adverts for We Buy Any Car, by which you enter all your vehicle details on an online form and receive an offer for it.

You then accept or reject the offer, but before rejecting you have to appreciate that your dealer is paying you immediate cash and is also collecting the car from you, so you are left with cash in the bank and no part exchange to hamper you in your next car purchase.

Now that last brings us neatly to something my research picked up – namely that to be successful in selling your car at the right price you need to have bought it at the right price in the beginning, which makes sense when you think about it.

So the more I dig into selling cars per se, the more useful money saving ideas I find, and it is painfully obvious that there is more to the job than a slick sales pitch and good coffee.

To reiterate the above, it is important to secure good a deal during the acquisition of the vehicle in the first place, so do your utmost to purchase the car the below market value, which will help you profit from selling the vehicle at market value at a later date.

However, my research said nothing about the newer online sales methods at all, you know the ones which start off with Sell my Car or sell my Mini, so the pages I read and took as gospel could well be out of date, but this is such an interesting topic that it will bear further inspection, so watch this space!

We were in the pub some evenings ago when someone shouted out, “what’s the best way to sell my car?” I was about to tell him of the wonderful new method of buying and selling online but someone jumped in before me with a totally inappropriate answer, there’s always someone isn’t there, and they always seem to know it all when in fact they are most likely to be the ones who know the least about any given topic.

Anyway, this chap strongly suggested selling privately as he had done in the past, and he had always got a good result. Now I know this chap rather well and know also that he always has cars which are near enough bangers which no self respecting dealer would touch with a bargepole. He always buys them for a song at auction because they are the leftovers no one else wants, so selling privately or to the scrap man are his only options.

And then it was my turn to speak out so I suggested that he go online and look for one of these companies which advertise that “We buy any car” as this method of car dealing was getting some heavy press these days and it wasn’t all bad by any means. The others in our party started quizzing me about this and so I told them all I knew – not that I knew a great deal other than it is an online way of selling your car quickly and for cash.

A few days later and who should I meet in the street but the guy from the pub who had been asking about selling his car, so I asked him how he had gone on with it.

“Absolutely wonderful,” he gushed, ” I just typed in sell my Volvo and masses of sites came up offering to do an online deal. I sold it in no time flat!”

Heck, after a good result like that all the guys in the pub look upon me as some sort of vehicle sales guru. How about that?

There are different ways of selling cars apparently, something of which I was blissfully unaware until a couple of months ago when my wife reminded me gently that it was high time to sell my car and replace it with something newer.

Dear me, I make my living as a writer and to be honest and truthful have not the faintest idea where the plugs are located in my Citroen Picasso, probably under the bonnet somewhere, but one never knows because apparently the battery is under the driving seat so they may have put the plugs somewhere funny too.

You may remember the old saying “ignorance is bliss”, and that is particularly true in my case even though I prefer the word “unaware” to “ignorant”, but the fact remains that people like myself who can just about top up the oil, the tyres and fill it with petrol now and then do exist. Do we need to know more? Will it benefit my kind if we discover where Citroen have hidden the plugs, and if we happen to find them then what do we do with the things?

Possibly my car has no plugs, so I may have searched for something which is not there, but I was still pondering quietly on this topic when the wife prompted me again and suggested that we do an online search for one of those car companies which say that “We buy any car“.

Pam is a practical old girl even if she didn’t grow up in the computer age, but she certainly knows how to make the best out of a deal, and over the years I have left things like that to her while I stay in the background wondering about spare wheels and the (possible) fact that if we bought another car it may or may not have a set of spark plugs stashed away somewhere.

Anyway, she was giving me an online demo and typed in sell my Mercedes – I wish – but apparently that was part of the demo and she left me to deal with the sell my Citroen when it was my turn.

It’s all very civilised and easy as all you do is type your car details into the online form, wait for the offer and a ‘phone call and then decide whether you really want to sell or not. A great way of selling cars if you ask me!

People who are into buying and selling cars on a regular basis, we don’t mean traders as such, but ordinary people who change their motors more than the normal will most probably be aware of the new and innovative method of buying and selling, and so they will certainly be aware that there are companies whose promise is that “We buy any car“.

It’s a great system which can benefit both the seller and the buyer too, and it all starts online, where else?

The basics of this method are that firstly the seller types something like sell my car or sell my Audi into his or her PC/laptop and that search brings up quite a few companies who are involved in online car sales. The surfer then chooses a company he or she likes the look and sound of and then types in the car details onto the online form which goes directly to the dealer.

In the case of We Buy Cars there are a host of dealers nationwide who are interested in buying certain marques, so the details are passed to them to see if they are interested in buying said motor. The dealer then gets in touch with the seller and they strike a deal, or not, as the case may be.

That’s it in a nutshell but the main implications for the seller are twofold in that firstly he/she has sold the car quickly and for cash, which of course leaves them in a superb position should they want to approach other dealers with a view to buying another vehicle, and that is the second most important thing about the new online car buying method. There is no part exchange to hamper any future purchase!

So just to recap on this: You want to sell your Bentley so you go to Google and type in sell my Bentley, fill in the form which starts with your registration number, then all the other vehicle details which follow, and within no time at all after accepting the deal you have cash paid into your bank.

Q.E.D

It was becoming obvious to the whole family that we would soon have to make an informed decision as to whether or not to sell my Ford and replace it with something more serviceable, and by that I mean newer and considerably more expensive – and it was the expense of course which was making me so apprehensive.

It is very true to say that the most expensive thing the ordinary person buys is a house, and much, much less expensive, but nevertheless still a huge outlay is the next thing on the list – a car.

OK, you can run around in an old banger and risk breakdowns for some years, and that is precisely what we had been doing with the Ford. We had bought the old girl many years before and it had done us stirling service from when the children were little to modern day, and they are nearly fully grown now, so with heavy hearts we all ackhowledged that the time had come to move on with another vehicle.

The problem then was just how I should sell my car and to whom, because all the signs were that we would have to use it as a trade in, knackered as it was, because it was still worth something. So who is going to take an old Ford, which has seen better days, in part ex for something newer, and more to the point, what will they give me for it?

The along came our saviour in the shape of a friend of my wife who told us what she and her husband had done recently. She said they had wanted to sell their Volvo just the same as we were trying to sell the Ford, but she was rather more proactive in their deal as she went online and typed sell my Volvo into the search engine, and apparently this brought up a whole host of results.

To cut a long story short, they sold their car online for cash, no less! So that is precisely what we shall try with our car.

Have you noticed just how many websites there are these days for selling cars? Sell My Audi, sell my Mini, sell my Mercedes, in fact sell my anything, and I was wondering just what has brought on this sudden influx of car sites.

I mentioned this to a mate who is rather more of a technical chap than I am and he is into cars in a much bigger way – by that I mean he thinks nothing about buying a car one day and selling it again soon after. He doesn’t make money on these deals, far from it, but he just likes a change now and then.

Anyway, he explained that if I wanted to sell my Mercedes for instance, it makes sense these days to sell it to a professional dealer who specialises in buying Mercedes because he will have a client list waiting to buy it from him, and that being the case I would get a better price from him than from a dealer taking it in part exchange.

I thought that was daft enough to make sense because I know just how notoriously mean dealers are when it comes to offering you money on your part ex, so I asked, as he did so many deals, if he had tried this new method of selling cars and he replied that he had.

His very words were, “I wanted to sell my Mini a few months ago and went online to get a cash offer.” I thought that this statement wanted a pinch of salt, but on the other hand he is a mate and he wouldn’t spin me a line would he?

And that is when I found all these car websites you see, the ones which buy cars online and give you an immediate cash payment. It can’t be bad!

Finance generally is a worry to a whole lot of people these days, and yours truly is no exception to that rule either, so you can probably share this moment of disappointment the wife and I had one day after we had been touring around what seemed like half the car dealers in Derbyshire and South Yorkshire trying to get a half decent price for my car in part exchange.

It all started when my wife wanted us to sell my Mercedes and buy a newer one – easy for her to say but I have to earn the pennies which pay for said newer one.

And that is precisely what set us off on this marathon trek around the dealers. Now I’m sure that most of us believe that our cars are worth more than any dealers say they are, but we have to look at things from their perspective just a little because they often have horrendous stock loans and overheads to take into account, so they need some sort of edge to cater for these.

Not that I’m on their side at all because I remember well the time before when we were trying vainly to sell my BMW and that ended in financial disaster just as this deal seemed doomed to do.

And then I turned to the Internet for help without really believing at that stage there would be anything to be gained from it but it wasted some time and was rexaxing into the bargain. I typed in “sell my Mercedes” and lo and behold there were pages of car sales adverts for all the different marques. Sell my Kia, sell my Audi, sell my Mini – they were all here, and at long last I had truly struck gold!

To cut a long story short it goes like this: You fill in the online form and some hours later, even the next day you are contacted by a dealer who specialises in Mercedes, BMW or whatever, and this guy makes an offer for your car.

Great stuff I thought, and so it turned out to be as the price I got from the dealer – cash mind you – was near enough what I was offeren in part exchange for another car!

Now the fun began because wifey and self toured around the dealers once more, but this time we were just finding out which one would give us the best deal and biggest discount because we had no part ex to hamper us this time!