But, this year, our Battle of the Buyers 2.0 competition took an unusual twist after the winner’s trophy ended up out of the grasp of our car dealer competitors.
The Carwow-powered competition saw six teams attempt to buy the used cars that would sell the fastest and for the most money in one daily auction.
The plan was simple: Teams would use their buying tactics to select two cars to win in an online Carwow auction which would then be handed over to the Clever Car Collection to sell. They could chose which car was entered into the competition.
The cars would all be advertised at exactly the same time, all priced at 102% of retail.
We then awarded the car that sold the fastest 6 points, down to one point for the slowest. And the same for the profit – the one that made the most got 6 points and the least one point.
Taking part this year were:
Scott Sibley – Redgate Lodge
Steven Douglas – Really Easy Car Credit
Jamie Caple – Car Quay
Ibrar Mohammed – MI Carz
Ourselves – The Clever Car Collection
And, if you watched the first video, you’ll have seen that a wild card entry was thrown in at the last minute in the form of John Veichmanis, Carwow CEO. And, yes, you guessed it, he won.
In our results video, which you can watch at the top of this post, you can see how he managed to pull off the ultimate result against a team of seasoned car buying pros.
The selection of cars bought as part of this year’s competition could certainly be best described as ‘interesting’.
A rather neglected red Fiat 500L was bought by Mohammed, a rare and not particularly popular Range Rover Evoque three door was snapped up by Sibley and Douglas found a Mini Countryman in another fetching shade of red.
If we have one rule at the Clever Car Collection it’s that we don’t buy red cars… but this competition broke that.
We selected a Vauxhall Corsa using some data science. As usual we picked our entry using Autotrader’s data points and looked for the highest retail rated car we could find with the lowest days to sell.
Carwow’s JV used a similar technique, winning a Fiat 500. Unfortunately, Caple’s choice – an Ingenium-powered (gulp) Discovery Sport – fell through (shame) so he was handed Carwow’s back-up car to enter in the competition instead, a Nissan Qashqai.
When the cars arrived, they were in varying states of readiness and after some expensive prep bills they were set loose.
As you can see from our table above, Carwow secured victory with a rapid sale of less than a day – the phone rang 14 hours after we advertised their little auto 500 and it made the second highest profit.
Clever Car Collection came in second with our Corsa selling a day later and taking third place in the profit ranking.
And in third was Caple with his donated Qashqai which took 29 days to sell and finished fourth for profit.
The Evoque, Countryman and woeful Fiat 500L finished in fourth, fifth and sixth respectively after clocking up some serious days in stock for us.
You can watch the buying video in the episode below and to watch the results episode, click on the video at the top of this post.
Our thanks go to Carwow for hosting the Battle of the Buyers 2.0 and congratulations on the win – leaving a gaggle of experienced car buyers in their wake really is quite something.
However, we’ll leave the final word to Douglas, who posted a simple summary on the YouTube video: ‘Fix.’
Carwow is hosting a used car webinar today, featuring Car Dealer editor in chief James Baggott. You can hear the latest on the market and learn about the brand’s latest developments by signing up for free here. It starts at 10am.
