7:55 am, March 6, 2026
The Car Dealer Briefing from James Baggott summarises the week’s most important motor trade headlines for you all in one place.
For this week’s edition of the Car Dealer Weekly Briefing, he reports exclusively on Big Motoring World founder Peter Waddell’s fight against the business he founded.
The case is continuing in the High Court and yesterday it was private equity firm Freshstream partner Raza Fardad’s turn in the witness box.
He revealed how much they’d stumped up for their stake in the used car business – and how they hadn’t always been the only bidder.
During questioning:
He revealed that there was ANOTHER bidder for Big Motoring World
He disclosed how much Freshstream paid for its stake in the business…
…and how much Peter Waddell wanted for it
How Freshstream had Waddell checked out by a corporate intelligence firm
How it had a clear fallback strategy to step in and take over if things went wrong
Also this week:
- DxB completes Harwoods deal
- Another Car Dealer Live headliner announced
- SMMT’s anger at the EU
- Just Motor Group sale
- Latest on FCA scheme
- Dacia names new car
- Is Honda in trouble?
- Illegal dealer closed down
- Used car prices rise
To read the weekly briefing, you usually need to be a subscriber on Substack, but this week’s post is free to all. You can sign up to the mailing list below.
Subscriptions to the Substack newsletter cost £10 per month, or £100 per year, and there are discounts for companies who want multiple subscriptions for their staff.
You can sign up to read your first newsletter for free today – visit the Substack website and subscribe.
There’s also a list of the top 10 most popular stories on the CarDealerMagazine.co.uk website this week which always makes for interesting reading as you can see what has piqued everyone else’s interest too.
Find it on the Substack website now.
