About · The Founder
The £20 lesson behind Remove My Car
Steve Queen at one of the network's Authorised Treatment Facilities.In 2008, Steve Queen had a Vauxhall Cavalier he wanted rid of. He did what anyone did back then: found a scrap man in the local paper and rang him, expecting to pay to have the car taken away. The man offered him twenty pounds, the Cavalier was gone within the hour, and Queen was delighted — until he learned the car had been worth more than two hundred.
Scrap was a closed world then. No listed prices, no way to compare, just a man with a recovery truck naming a number. That is the world Remove My Car was built to end.
Everything I've built comes back to that phone call. Nobody should find out afterwards what their car was worth. They should know before it goes on the truck.Steve Queen, Founder
From one car to almost a million
After a redundancy at the end of 2008, Queen spent a year buying and selling cars, then supplying a parts exporter that took dozens a month. To feed that contract, around 2009 he launched Remove My Car, a simple website for sourcing vehicles, and found something bigger than the contract: sellers from all over the country, all wanting the same thing. He took the service national as one of the first in the UK to offer scrap quotes online.
It nearly ended in 2011, when a Google algorithm update wiped the site's rankings overnight. It took a year to rebuild, this time with fully automated quotes, and by 2014 the business was back on its feet and began keeping the records that now cover almost one million vehicles.
The named voice of the network
Queen still runs Remove My Car, and he is its public face by design: the data studies, the industry commentary and the evidence submitted to government consultations all carry his name, because a network asking for your car should be run by someone willing to put theirs on it. His advice to anyone with a car at the end of its life is the advice he wishes someone had given him in 2008: find out what it is worth before you agree to anything.
Journalists: Steve Queen is available for comment on vehicle recycling, values and end-of-life trends: [email protected] · 0330 159 1588. We aim to turn media requests around within two hours. More about the company: about Remove My Car.
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