The City That Built Them: Counting Coventry’s Last Cars

Data · Steve Queen, Founder

A factory closes twice. Once when the line stops, and again eighteen years later when the last cars it made reach the end of the road. Coventry is going through the second one now.

Every scrappage chart is really a sales chart from two decades earlier. The typical car we collect is eighteen years old, up from thirteen in 2014, which means the vehicles reaching us today were new around 2008. That simple lag is why a city can lose its factories in one decade and lose its cars in the next, and why Coventry's second closure is happening quietly, on ordinary driveways, right now.

The last Peugeot 206 came off the line at Ryton on 12 December 2006. Browns Lane had stopped building Jaguars the year before. Canley's line went silent back in 1980. The city that put Britain on wheels stopped making them a generation ago, and we have spent the years since watching what it made come back to us.

Our records cover 962,630 vehicles collected since August 2014. Of those, 31,378 were built in Coventry. The breakdown is the city's own history, in the order it was made:

24,410 Peugeot 206s. Ryton's last and biggest product, and by a long way the most common Coventry-built car we see.
5,143 Jaguars of the Browns Lane era, the cars that gave the city its reputation abroad.
1,825 London black cabs. Coventry's most recognisable export, still arriving from every corner of the country.
33 Triumphs from the Canley works, assembled a short walk from where I grew up.

That last line is the one I find hardest to read. Thirty-three is not a statistic, it is a handful. Canley stopped in 1980 and almost everything it made has already gone.

Ryton cars reached us in their greatest numbers in 2018, twelve years after the plant shut, and the volume has fallen away since. Fewer than 1,700 206s have come through from the start of 2024 to now. On the current trend the Ryton generation will be effectively finished within a few years, and the only ones left will be the cars somebody decided to keep.

That is not a sad ending, it is an unusually good innings. A car that works for eighteen years before anyone thinks about scrapping it is a car that was built properly, and Coventry built well over a million of these.

The 206 has become one of the cheapest cars in the country to say goodbye to. In the twelve months to July 2026, the average payout on a 206 collected through our network was £166, against £289 for a Jaguar. Both figures are what the owner was actually paid, not a guide price.

The gap is weight and metal, not sentiment. A Jaguar carries more of both, and a 206 is a small car that has spent two decades getting lighter in all the ways that matter. The few that are being kept rather than scrapped are starting to cross into modern classic territory, which is usually the point at which the survivors stop falling in value and start climbing again.

I grew up watching these cars get built, and I have spent my working life watching them finish. There is no drama in it. A Ryton 206 comes off a driveway in Nuneaton on a Tuesday morning and that is the last anyone sees of it. Someone should keep the count, so here it is.Steve Queen, Founder, Remove My Car

Because this is what the end of a manufacturing town actually looks like, and it takes forty years rather than one bad afternoon. The plant closes and the news moves on. The cars carry on quietly for two decades, holding up the parts trade, the independent garages, the Saturday jobs, and then they go too, one at a time, without a headline between them.

Coventry is further through that process than anywhere else in Britain because it started earlier and built more. Every other city that made things is somewhere behind it on the same road. The numbers above are the only record I know of that counts the last part properly, and they exist because the business doing the counting happens to have been started by someone from the city in question.

If one of these is sitting on your driveway, the only advice I ever give is the advice I wish someone had given me: find out what it is worth before you agree to anything.

Check what your car is worth

By Steve Queen, Founder, Remove My Car · Coventry totals from our records of 962,630 vehicles collected August 2014 to August 2026. Payout averages are accepted collections, August 2025 to July 2026. Journalists: [email protected] · 0330 159 1588. We aim to turn media requests around within two hours.

Joe Kendrick

Automotive Content Writer