How to know when it's time to sell your car

Selling your car at the right time isn't always easr - Andrew Crowley

This article was originally published in August 2013. Follow James Foxall's expert advice to get the best price when selling your car.

You would imagine there are some hard and fast rules for the ultimate age at which to sell a car. Do you wait until the warranty runs out? Or sell it just before? Or do you keep it until things start failing?

According to Dylan Setterfield, forecasting editor for CAP used car price guide: “There isn’t a particular age where the depreciation and value curves combine at their most beneficial.

Cars do most of their depreciating in the first nine months. But if you’re looking to sell a car to trade up, you want to sell it when it’s relatively new because the younger a car is, the more it’s worth.”

But a more influential factor is the market, something we have no control over. “If, say, you’re looking to sell a Volkswagen and it sold a lot of cars to the daily rental business last July, those cars will come on to the market next month and the price of VWs will drop,” says Setterfield.

So, if there isn’t a perfect age for selling in depreciation and price terms, when do cars start to go wrong? A reliability chart compiled by Warranty Direct, which specialises in cover when the makers’ guarantees have expired (reliabilityindex.com) makes fascinating reading.

Its suggests that when cars reach five years old their failure rate is higher than at any time in their life, and start to go wrong more from about 60,000 miles.

So sell too early and you’ll be bitten by depreciation, but leave it too late and reliability could be a factor. Then there’s the fluctuating market to consider. Being informed has never been more important.

Sell Your Car Online | Motorway.co.uk | how_to_know_when_to_sell_your_car