Trade valuation, market by market.
Bracken Value serves the damaged-vehicle trade across multiple markets. Coverage, terminology, tax treatment and data rights are handled separately for each, rather than averaged into a single pan-European model.
United Kingdom
Trade pricing for damaged and written-off cars and light commercials, with UK write-off categories, registration records, margin-scheme treatment and export routes handled natively.
Germany
Salvage and Restwert trade, with terminology, tax treatment and vehicle classification validated separately rather than mapped onto UK categories.
Ireland
Close to the UK in vehicle mix and right-hand drive demand, but with its own classification practice and a cross-border flow that distorts naive comparisons in both directions.
France
The véhicule endommagé framework and its procedural controls on resale behave differently from a category letter, and have to be modelled on their own terms.
Netherlands
A small domestic market with outsized export significance. Port proximity and onward routes matter more to price here than in most markets of comparable size.
Poland
A major destination for repairable imports. Buyer demand here sets the floor for a meaningful share of damaged stock sold elsewhere in Europe.
Why the UK is modelled first, and carefully
The UK has an unusually explicit damage-classification system and unusually good identity records. That combination makes it the best market to build a rigorous method in — and it also produces the sector's most confident mistakes, because a tidy category letter invites people to price off the letter instead of the evidence.
The category system describes a decision, not a condition
UK write-off categories record how an insurer classified a vehicle at the point of a claim decision. That decision blends structural assessment with commercial thresholds, salvage return, policy terms and the assessor's own judgement. Two similar cars can be categorised differently by different insurers on the same day. Reading the letter as a statement about damage severity — or about value — reverses the direction of the information.
Non-repairable categories are a different market entirely
Cat A and Cat B vehicles are not discounted cars. They are dismantling and recycling cases, priced on recoverable parts, metals content and disposal obligations. They must never be presented as repairable road vehicles, and their observations must never be pooled with repairable stock. Where those two populations are mixed in a dataset, every summary statistic drawn from it is meaningless.
The structural / non-structural split is coarser than it looks
The distinction between the two repairable categories is about whether structural damage was recorded, not about how much it costs to put right. A lightly damaged car with a recorded structural element and a heavily damaged one without can sit on either side of the line. Buyers price the underlying damage and the market's reaction to the marker, which are two separate effects that need separating in the model.
The permanent marker is itself a price factor
Once recorded, the classification follows the vehicle and is visible to future buyers through provenance checks. That imposes a discount on subsequent resale that is independent of the physical condition. It varies by model, age and buyer type — larger on newer and prestige vehicles, smaller on older stock where the pre-loss value gives it less room to work.
Mileage and history records are strong but not complete
Registration and test history give a usable spine for identity and mileage. They do not establish service quality, prior unrecorded repair, or what was actually replaced. Treating the record as a full history is a well-known source of overvaluation at the top of the condition range.
Regional variation is a transport and export function
Location moves salvage prices more than most people expect, and it does so for logistical reasons: distance to buyers, proximity to ports, onward export routes and the cost of moving a non-running vehicle. A postcode is not a demographic input here; it is a freight and access input.
Tax and fee treatment decide what was really paid
Whether a sale sits under a margin scheme, what buyer premium and lot fees applied, and who bore collection — these can move the effective cost by a large fraction on low-value lots. Any UK dataset that does not record them is reporting a number that nobody paid.
Insurer thresholds move the population, not just the price
When the economics of repair shift — parts lead times, labour rates, courtesy-car costs — the boundary between repair and total loss moves with them. That changes which vehicles enter the salvage market at all. Comparing this year's salvage prices to a period with a different threshold is comparing two different populations, not two points on a trend.
Why one European model does not work
The temptation with cross-border coverage is to normalise everything into one schema and report a single figure. It produces broader apparent coverage and a worse answer in every individual market.
Classification frameworks do not translate
Each market records damage and total loss differently, with different legal consequences for resale. Mapping one country's categories onto another's is a convenience that erases the part that carries the price signal.
Tax and fee bases differ
Margin schemes, recoverable tax and fee conventions vary. Averaging across them mixes gross and net figures and produces a spread that looks like market variation and is actually accounting.
Demand is directional
Damaged stock flows along established export corridors. A price in an origin market partly reflects demand in a destination market, so treating countries as independent samples double-counts the same buyers.
Provenance disclosure differs
How visible a damage history is to the next buyer, and for how long, differs by country. That visibility is itself a large part of the resale discount.
More on grading the underlying data on the evidence page.