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 Coventry Telegraph classifieds 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
A Coventry story
Queen grew up in Canley, a short walk from the old Standard-Triumph works, one of the plants that made Coventry the centre of the British motor industry. Car assembly there finally stopped in 1980, the year he was born. He went to Alderman Callow, the Canley school that has since closed, and the city's cars have followed him through the business ever since: the network's records show 31,378 Coventry-built vehicles collected to date, made up of 24,410 Peugeot 206s built at Ryton, 5,143 Jaguars from the Browns Lane era and 1,825 London black cabs, with 33 Triumphs collected alongside them, cars that may well have been assembled a short walk from where he grew up.
The Ryton cars are close to finished: deaths of the 206s peaked in 2018, and fewer than 1,700 have come through since the start of 2024. Coventry's rolling stock is nearly gone from Britain's roads, and much of it has passed through the network of a man who watched the city build it.
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. "It costs nothing to ask," he says. "It cost me a hundred and eighty quid not to."
As featured in
CoventryLive
I started with an advert in the Cov Tel and now I've scrapped almost a million cars
In 2008, Steve Queen had a burgundy Vauxhall Cavalier he wanted rid of. He did what anyone did back then: found a scrap man in the back of the Coventry Telegraph and rang him, expecting to pay to have the thing taken away. The man offered him twenty pounds. The Cavalier was collected 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, just a man with a recovery truck naming a…
Read the article →The founder's story, September 2026
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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