This is an investigative report on the car market trends for 2010 taken from the Car Arena database which includes data from older car buyer websites, data complied and analysed by tc software.
Some 450,000 car owners requested valuation over this period with a high confidence that they intended to sell their vehicle. The information in this report is the product of an investigation into the dataset and should only be considered indicative of the market conditions and not authoritative.
Between November 2008 and October 2009 49.08% of cars at the time of valuation was found in the DVLA's records to have 1 previous owner, 26.87% had 2 previous owners and 11.99% had 3.
This dropped to 48.40% for 1 previous owner, 26.04% for 2 and increased to 12.27% for 3 previous owners in 2010 for the same period.
The data also showed that interest in sales of vehicles with four or more previous owners rose by 10.2% in 2010.
Between November 2008 and October 2009 the data showed on average a car posted for valuation would have only 1 previous owner this changed for the same period in 2009/2010 to 2 previous owners and was caused by many more cars with 3 or more owners requesting a valuation on their vehicle.
While there is very little data to go on in this report and only an experiment it would seem that the statistics indicate the used car market in the UK is only slightly biased towards older vehicles in 2010. This is an unexpected result as the disruption caused by the Financial Crisis and the impact it had on the motor industry was expected to hit the nearly new car market much harder in 2010.