6:44 am, September 13, 2025
Bargains come in many forms – but I’m starting to think I’ve won the part exchange lottery with my latest purchase: A £500 Renault Zoe.
Last week we sold one of our imported Volkswagen Ups to a customer who desperately needed something with a bit more range than his EV.
He’d ha d his Zoe for six years and during that time added nearly 50,000 miles to it. But after getting a new job in London and, facing the daily prospect of two charges to get himself home and back, he decided it was time to go back to petrol.
Can’t say I disagreed with him.
We agreed a price for his part-ex of £1,000 remotely, subject to an inspection, so when he popped in to see our Up I had a good look round it.
Yes, it had a few marks here and there – a large scuff on the passenger side rear door and some nicks in the rear bumper – but overall it wasn’t too bad at all.
But then I Experian checked it. We do this with all part exchanges to make sure we don’t get caught out with outstanding finance or insurance write-offs, but this one had something else: A strange mileage anomaly.
Back in 2019 an MOT tester had seemingly put a ‘2’ at the start of the mileage rather than what I suspect should have been a ‘3’. This meant it looked like it had been clocked and gone back 8,000 miles in a year, rather than simply increasing 2,000.
Or, it could have been clocked. That was the risk.
I broke the bad news to the customer, who knew nothing about it. I said he’d definitely get more selling it privately, or putting it on a consumer-to-trade auction platform, and offered him £500 in case he wanted a quick out.
A quick out is exactly what he wanted. We shook on £500 for it and he drove away in our Up a happy man.
Retail price for this Zoe is around £3,500 – but I’m not sure what the appeal will be to buyers with the mileage anomaly. While I can look past it, and genuinely believe it’s just an honest mistake by an MOT tester, I’m not sure retail customers would be quite so forgiving.
And no, you can’t just get the figures changed for that MOT test. There’s a 24 hour window after a test is carried out where you can log a dispute, but after that there’s nothing you can do.
So what’s a £500 Renault Zoe actually like? Well, in our video above you can find out the details but, in short, it is amazingly good.
Our mechanic – a man who (is paid to) find fault with everything – signed it off as ‘very clean’. And when it comes to positive reviews from this man, that’s about as good as it gets.
My colleague Jon Reay and I gave it a thorough road test and it still drives superbly. There are no squeaks or creaks and the range is, well, mildly adequate. But then it wasn’t much better than that new.
We plugged in our battery testing software from Generational too and found that after 81,000 miles and 11 years the battery still had 92% of its capacity left. I was, frankly, amazed at that.
I’m so impressed with it I might actually keep it. It’s a huge amount of car for a very little money and if I use it for the winter, when it might be a bit too cold and wet to use my bicycle, it could be at least one step up from life on two wheels.
Well, just about anyway.
