Motorway extends daily live car sale times

Used car marketplace Motorway is changing the hours of its daily live sale to enable dealers to start placing bids from 7pm the night before, until 3:30pm the following day.

To date, dealers have been given access to preview the next day’s sale from 7pm which meant they could select and save vehicles that went into the live sale at 8am the following day in advance. However, Motorway said that feedback from its dealer partners revealed that they would prefer to have more flexibility to start bidding. 

Dealers can now bid from 7pm the night before, with the live sale ending the following day at 3:30pm, half an hour later than previously. This change will give dealers more time to bid and make it easier to secure stock when convenient to them.

Dealers can also make the most of Motorway’s proxy bidding feature alongside this new earlier live sale time. Proxy bidding allows dealers to set a maximum bid for a vehicle during the sale, automatically bidding on their behalf in increments of £50 so they can be sure they never overpay to secure a vehicle.

Oliver Grummell, commercial director, Motorway, said: “We know that some of our dealers like to get ahead and review cars the night before the sale starts. Those dealers have been asking us to enable them to bid the night before as well, so that’s exactly what we’ve enabled. And coupled with our proxy bidding feature, our smart tech can do the heavy lifting for them, without ever over-bidding. This is just one of the ways we are laser-focused on making the dealer experience even better at Motorway.”

The team has launched a series of new products and features in 2023 to further improve the dealer experience for acquiring stock, including Motorway Pay - an industry-first solution that enables dealers to fund a secure online wallet and then release money to private sellers instantly to complete transactions.

Motorway has also introduced other innovations to further strengthen the platform this year, including new service history filters, purchase status tag filters, surfacing mechanical or electrical damage and MOT data which help dealers save time when buying premium, privately owned used-car stock.