Motorway Brand Guidelines: Daily Dealer Auctions & “It’s Not Magic. It’s Motorway.”

Three founders, an office and a car-selling idea.

Motorway is a British online marketplace on which private owners sell their cars to dealers. It was founded by Tom Leathes, Harry Jones and Alex Buttle. The company’s own timeline dates its start to 2017, and English Wikipedia says it was co-founded and launched in July 2017. The operating company, Motorway Online Ltd, was incorporated in July 2016, according to Companies House, and City A.M. wrote in July 2024 of the firm’s “inception in 2016.”

The three founders were not new to start-ups. Leathes told City A.M. in June 2025 that the trio had worked together for about 20 years and that Motorway was their fifth company. The one before it had closed, and the three then spent about six months in an office working through ideas before settling on the car market, which Leathes described as a large sector where people found it hard to transact. Their first website simply gave an instant valuation. One of the founders would then call the seller, the seller would send photos of the car over WhatsApp, and the founders would phone car dealers around the country to find a buyer, he said.

That manual routine became the model for the product. The company says it set up a customer-support team in Brighton in 2018 and, in 2019, built a guided photo process so that a seller could profile a car with a phone camera alone. Early backers included the seed investors LocalGlobe and Marchmont Ventures, English Wikipedia says; City A.M. lists Index Ventures, Iconiq, Marchmont Ventures, LocalGlobe and BMW i Ventures among its investors. In November 2021 a Series C round co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ Growth gave Motorway unicorn status, according to English Wikipedia. The company is headquartered in London with an office in Brighton, and its website says it employs about 400 people across the two cities.

Daily auctions and verified dealers.

Motorway does not sell cars to the public. English Wikipedia describes it as a marketplace that lets private sellers sell directly to dealers through daily online auctions, and notes that it offers no listings or direct purchases for consumers. A seller builds a profile of the car with photos and dealers bid on it; the company says every dealer is verified before it can bid, and that it helps settle any outstanding finance. In July 2024 City A.M. described the model as instant online auctions that match each car with the dealer who most wants it, and reported that the firm sold around 1,000 cars a day and handled about five per cent of UK used-car sales.

Most scale figures come from the company itself. Its about page, read in November 2026, claims more than 8,000 verified dealers, up to 9,000 cars listed in its auction each week on average, and more than one million people who have used it to sell a car. City A.M. reported in September 2026 that more than a million cars had been sold through the platform.

The dealer side has its own tools. In May 2023 Motorway launched Motorway Pay, a wallet that dealers fund in advance and then use to pay private sellers instantly when a car is collected; Motor Trader reported that Motorway called it an “industry first,” that it had been tested with a small group of dealers earlier that year, and that it was free to dealers. English Wikipedia says Motorway bought the vehicle-check service Total Car Check in 2023. On the consumer side the website runs a car value tracker and MOT, tax and ULEZ checkers alongside the valuation form.

Trade recognition has followed. Motorway won the Online Used Car Trading Platform award at the Motor Trader Industry Awards in London on 30 November 2021, the company announced, and English Wikipedia lists later awards from Car Dealer Magazine in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 in its stock-acquisition categories.

Remarketing and car buying.

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.

Sport sponsorship and a 2025 creative platform.

Motorway built its name on broadcast sport. ITV announced it in January 2022 as the stand-alone sponsor of its live Guinness Six Nations coverage across 2022 and 2023, with idents produced by the creative agency Wonderhood Studios and media planned by MG OMD. The company then sponsored BT Sport’s Premier League coverage for the 2022/23 season and, from August 2023, TNT Sports’ coverage of the Premier League, the UEFA Europa League and the Europa Conference League, with idents in which the former players Peter Crouch and Joe Cole recreated famous football celebrations, the company announced.

In March 2025 Marketing Week reported a new campaign and positioning built around how “effortless” it is to sell a car online. The company dates a new brand identity and visual platform to 2025, under the line “It’s not magic. It’s Motorway.” When Motorway renewed the TNT Sports deal for a third season in August 2025, Marketing Beat reported that the new idents, starring Ally McCoist, belonged to that creative platform; chief marketing officer Naomi Walkland said the films compared the moment of selling a car with a winning goal. Leathes told City A.M. in September 2026 that the firm, which had struck a deal with TNT to sponsor its Premier League broadcasts that year, was “still doing a lot of brand marketing.”

The website describes Motorway as the UK’s first platform built only around selling cars, a claim that rests on the company’s own word. Its typefaces and colour values are not published as a guide.

For a design guide, Motorway shows how a marketplace with no showroom can build a consumer brand through sport sponsorship and one recurring line. Compare We Buy Any Car, a British car-buying service known for its television jingles, and Cazoo, another British online car brand. For this guide we use ink, a warm amber and soft paper tones with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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