Can we easily sell our left-hand-drive, wheelchair-adapted car in the UK?

Dear Alex,

We have a French-registered, left-hand-drive Peugeot 5008 diesel with an adapted roof and boot that raises, stows and lowers a folded wheelchair. We are returning to the UK soon and plan to use the car for a short time before selling it. Is there a British market for such an adapted vehicle?

–BL

Dear BL,

In short: not really. Wheelchair-accessible vehicles (WAV) are a niche market; so are left-hand-drive vehicles. Consequently, you’d be trying to sell a niche within a niche, which makes the target audience for such a car vanishingly small – limited, in other words, to buyers who might need wheelchair adaptation and travel abroad regularly, or intend to emigrate.

Add in the fact that the car would still be registered in France – unless you went through the rigmarole of getting it converted to UK specification and re-registering it here – and I imagine the number of people interested in taking it on would be few. 

However, if you’re willing to sell it cheaply, there will always be someone willing to buy it, perhaps an exporter who will pay a low enough price that they can clear some profit in sending the car back to the Continent and selling it there.

The better alternative would be to sell the car to a French dealer who specialises in wheelchair-adapted vehicles once you’ve finished with it in the UK – drive the car back across the Channel to hand it over, and then fly home or get the train. It’s more hassle, but you’ll realise a better price in the car’s home market. 

Alternatively, you could do it the other way around – sell the car before you relocate and buy a UK-registered, right-hand-drive equivalent, then use that to complete your move back to Britain. 

The downside to doing it this way round, of course, is that you’d have to buy the new car sight unseen, fly over to collect it, and then hope it was in good enough fettle to undertake an immediate long drive.

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