I started with an advert in the Cov Tel and now I've scrapped almost a million cars His old burgundy Vauxhall Cavalier kick-started a business that now runs nation wide
Steve Queen who was inspired to start his now nationwide business after finding an advert in the Coventry Telegraph classified section(Image: Submitted)
When a Coundon man had an old car he wanted to get rid of, he turned to the classified adverts section in the Coventry Telegraph.
Little did Steve Queen know that that decision in 2008 would, almost 20 years later, lead to him owning a business that operates across the country.
He had a burgundy Vauxhall Cavalier he wanted rid of, and found a scrap man in the back of the Coventry Telegraph and rang him, expecting to pay to have the thing taken away.
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The man offered him £20 and the car was collected within the hour leaving the Coundon resident delighted he had got some money for a car he thought was a liability,
However, he soon found out he could have got over £200 for the car as the scrap world back then had no listed prices, it was simply just a man with a recovery truck naming a number.
"There were a lot of rogue traders around Coventry back then," he says. "I was determined to do things properly."
Steve Queen who was inspired to start his now nationwide business after finding an advert in the Coventry Telegraph classified section(Image: Submitted)
It led to him setting up Remove My Car, which now boasts a network of around 200 licensed recycling yards that has collected more than 960,000 vehicles across the UK since 2014
"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."
It started at the end of 2008 when the former Alderman Callow pupil had been made redundant
He started by buying and selling cars himself. He spent a year trading old Ford Fiestas, buying in the Midlands and driving them south, and barely broke even.
Then a Polish exporter got in touch, wanting cars for parts, dozens a month, and it became a real business, with a yard and eight staff.
To feed the contract, around 2009 he launched Remove My Car, a simple website for sourcing cars. It was never built for what happened next: enquiries from sellers all over the country, far more than one export contract could ever absorb. The demand was national; one yard could never serve it, but a network of local yards could.
"It was obvious people just wanted a straight answer and someone who would actually turn up and pay the price agreed," he explained .
"I didn't want to offer that just locally. I wanted to offer it nationally."
One of UK's first
He quit the successful export business to focus on the network full time, took Remove My Car national, and became one of the first in the UK to offer quotes online.
Then, in 2011, with the national move barely made, he said that Google 'pulled the rug out from under him.'.
A major algorithm update wiped out the site's search rankings overnight.
It led to the end of some small businesses that depended on being found online. But Steve chose to rebuild and, despite taking a year, the business was back with fully automated quotes, which he says felt revolutionary at the time.
The business took another two years to properly recover.
By 2014 Remove My Car was back on its feet, and that's when he started properly tracking the data on every car the network collected, which has led to
What he had built was drawing attention beyond the scrap trade. Queen took meetings with Volkswagen Group, Ford and Mazda, with the industry's trade body the SMMT, and with the Metropolitan Police.
He has advised on the effectiveness of scrappage and clean air schemes, including in discussions with Birmingham City Council.
Coventry's own cars, coming back round
His company's records show that 31,378 Coventry-built vehicles have been collected through the network: 24,410 Peugeot 206s built at Ryton, 5,143 Jaguars from the Browns Lane era, and 1,825 London black cabs.
Also 33 Triumphs, cars that could have been assembled a short walk from where he grew up.
By the time most of the cars now reaching the end of the road were built, Coventry had all but stopped building them.
Ryton built more than 1.3 million 206s before the line stopped in 2006. The deaths of the Ryton cars peaked in 2018, and fewer than 1,700 have come through since the start of 2024.
It means that Coventry's rolling stock is nearly gone from Britain's roads..
The future
Now, 18 years after it all started, Steve's company is about 37,000 collections short of a million, a mark he expects to hit in the spring of next year.,
There will be a special treat for the customer behind the millionth car a brand new electric car.
With the milestone looming, he sad that he now gives the same advice to anyone with a car at the end of its life - it is the advice he wishes someone had given him in 2008.
This is to find out what it is worth before you agree to anything.
"It costs nothing to ask," he said. "It cost me a hundred and eighty quid not to."
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