CarNext Brand Guidelines: LeasePlan’s Used-Car Marketplace, Sold to Constellation in 2021

A leasing company sells its own returns.

CarNext began inside LeasePlan, the car-leasing and fleet company founded in the Netherlands in 1963, according to English Wikipedia. Every leasing company has to sell its cars when the contracts end, usually through wholesalers and auctions. CarNext was LeasePlan’s attempt to sell those three- to four-year-old cars directly, to private buyers as well as to the trade, through its own website.

The launch date is given two ways. Fleet World, reporting on LeasePlan’s 2018 annual report in March 2019, said the CarNext.com business was launched in late 2017; L’argus wrote in November 2022 that CarNext was created in 2018 by the Dutch lessor. In September 2018 Business Car reported that LeasePlan had launched CarNext.com in the UK, that the concept had begun in the Netherlands, and that it already operated in 16 other countries. In Portugal, Fleet Magazine reported in June 2018 that LeasePlan Portugal had relaunched the CarNext brand for its used-car sales, on a renewed online platform.

The idea was simple to explain. Customers could pick a car online, buy it without seeing it and have it delivered, or visit a physical centre to look at it and drive it first. Business Car described fixed, non-negotiable prices and a site at Milton Keynes, and said the company had 25 CarNext sites across its European markets. By March 2019, Fleet World reported, CarNext.com worked in both business and consumer sales across 22 countries, with 32 delivery stores and an app available in 36 countries, and it had sold about 50,000 cars to consumers in 2018.

The Portuguese launch shows the formula in one market. Fleet Magazine reported that the cars came from LeasePlan Portugal’s own leasing business, were on average three to four years old with full service histories, carried fixed, all-inclusive prices, and that the relaunched site opened with more than 500 cars; in the UK, Business Car said the Milton Keynes site held a rolling stock of 200 to 300 vehicles.

From a LeasePlan unit to a Constellation brand.

LeasePlan did not plan to keep CarNext as a simple sales channel. In its 2018 annual report, Fleet World reported, the company said it was reviewing strategic alternatives for the business, including separating it as an “asset light, commission-based online sales platform” on which LeasePlan and other suppliers would sell their used cars. The physical network kept growing in the meantime: in March 2019 the Portuguese site Autonews reported a new CarNext.com centre at Gaia, joining Matosinhos, Carnaxide and Lisbon, and offering buying, renting and subscription of used cars.

The separation came in 2021. According to Le Figaro, writing with the AFP news agency in December 2022, CarNext split from LeasePlan in early 2021 and raised new capital to expand in Europe. In the same period it was known to a wider public as a sponsor of the Formula 1 driver Max Verstappen, Le Figaro noted.

On 15 October 2021, Motor Trader reported, Constellation Automotive Group announced that it was acquiring CarNext, which it described as a business-to-business and business-to-consumer digital used-car marketplace present in 22 European countries. Constellation is the owner of the auction company BCA, the car-buying service We Buy Any Car and the online retailer Cinch, and is majority-owned by the investment firm TDR Capital, Car Dealer Magazine reported; terms were not disclosed. According to Motor Trader, CarNext was on course for annualised sales in 2021 of about 40,000 cars through its consumer marketplace and about 210,000 through its online trade auctions, and it had a long-term agreement to receive about 250,000 used cars a year from LeasePlan. Car Dealer Magazine added that the consumer marketplace ran in seven of the largest European markets, and gave CarNext’s base as Amsterdam.

LeasePlan itself changed hands soon after. English Wikipedia records that the French leasing company ALD Automotive completed its purchase of LeasePlan on 22 May 2023; Dutch Wikipedia says the combined business took the name Ayvens.

Design and documentation.

Vehicle remarketing firms sell cars that have already had a first life: lease returns, fleet cars, rental cars and, at the salvage end, vehicles written off by insurers. The companies in this group present much of their business through listings, photographs and data. VPauto, the French auction house, says it opened 3D photo studios in 2014 and shows each vehicle with close-up photographs and a defect record marked on a body diagram; IAA said in 2012 that its redesigned bidding tool let buyers view ten photographs of each vehicle at once.

Bidding and valuation tools sit at the centre of these brands. VPauto’s LIVE platform films the sale and takes online bids in real time while a licensed auctioneer runs the room, the company says. In August 2023 RB Global said its IAA business had released a vehicle score built from four corner photographs, a valuation model and a sales decision dashboard for sellers. IAA’s releases give those tools trademarked names, as they would products.

Consumer-facing names are newer. British Car Auctions’ parent launched cinch, an online used-car marketplace for private buyers, in July 2019, and English Wikipedia says cinch has held naming rights to the Scottish Premiership since the 2021–22 season. VPauto has staged themed sales, including an auction of electric vehicles only at Caudan in March 2026, reported by Bevolt.

Corporate pages tell a story of owners and sites. RB Global presents IAA as one of its brands and says IAA joined it in 2023; Constellation Automotive Group, renamed in 2020, owns BCA; and VPauto lists eight sale sites across France. This guide draws on those owner pages, site lists and dated press reports, and marks what rests on a company’s own word.

Retail stops, trade sales go on.

The consumer business shrank quickly under its new owner. On 4 November 2022 L’argus reported that CarNext had stopped selling cars to private buyers in Germany, Norway and Italy. Its Norwegian site announced that it was closing its locations there, while the German and Italian sites told visitors that sales to dealers were continuing. L’argus added, citing the Dutch trade title Automotive, that CarNext had also ended consumer sales in the Netherlands.

France followed in December 2022. Le Figaro and Frenchweb, both reporting on 15–16 December 2022, said CarNext had announced on its website that its French sales points were closed, ending retail sales from the outlets it had opened at Rennes, Lyon and Maurepas, outside Paris. Both reports said the business was continuing its sales to motor-trade professionals and was still selling to private buyers in Spain and Portugal at that time.

CarNext therefore no longer exists in the form LeasePlan built: a retail network with delivery centres in several European countries ended in most of them in 2022, four years or so after launch. English Wikipedia still lists CarNext among the subsidiaries of Constellation Automotive Group.

Its story mirrors that of other online used-car retailers of the same years. Cazoo, the British online retailer, withdrew from its European markets in 2022, which L’argus and Le Figaro both mentioned alongside CarNext.

For a design guide, CarNext shows how a leasing company tried to turn the sale of its returned cars into a consumer brand, and how that brand was cut back to its trade core within a year of being sold. Compare Cinch, Constellation’s British online retailer, and BCA, the auction company within the same group. For this guide we use a deep teal, an amber and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CarNext’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.