Vehicle value swings of up to £7,000 could leave policyholders facing insurance gap

Do you own an electric Audi Q7? If so, you may be pleased to hear that the average resale price of your vehicle has risen by nearly £7,000 over the past 12 months.

If you’re the owner of a Range Rover Evoque, however, you may be less enthused to know that your vehicle has fallen in value by a little over £5,000 in the same period.

And while you may not be planning to sell up any time soon, these dramatic fluctuations have a meaningful impact on the appropriate insurance coverage of a vehicle, for both policyholders and insurer alike.

To highlight just how substantial these movements can be, and how best to respond to them, Insurance Times has analysed the top 10 biggest movers on insurtech Percayso Inform’s Vehicle Intelligence Platform, a daily tracker of over 800,000 car sales across over three million sale adverts.

Coverage implications

For policyholders, finding out that their car’s market value is less than expected can be a nasty surprise in the event of a total loss.

Moreover, in the case of automated renewals, successive decreases in their vehicle’s value over multiple years is often not met with a commensurate fall in premiums – indeed, premiums tend to creep up over time.

Worse still, for the smaller number consumers – often those with classic, collectible or modified cars – that opt for an agreed value policy, a rise in their vehicle’s value before a payout will see them pocket less than its current worth.

For insurers, accurate vehicle pricing is vital to maintaining underwriting discipline, as the volatility of the resale market means that valuations at the point of loss can swing by many thousands of pounds in the space of just a few months. Aggregated to portfolio level, the variations can be large.

Kieran Fisher, director of insurance at vehicle market data firm Cazana, explained that many vehicle owners “set a value at inception and never revisit it”.

“Used car prices have been volatile and vehicles that were over-insured in 2022 may now be underinsured. Owners also confuse trade-in price – what a dealer offers [to purchase their vehicle] – with retail replacement cost – what they’d actually pay to replace it,” he continued.

“The gap can be significant. Using a real time, retail-backed valuation on each renewal would reflect what a comparable vehicle costs in the open market today, not six months ago.”

And the value fluctuations are indeed significant. The Audi Q7, which sold for an average price of £37,240 in June 2025, rose by almost £7,000 in 12 months to a price of £43,940 in June 2026.

Mercedes-Benz E Class vehicles also climbed from £31,160 to £38,380 over the period, as did the Audi Q3 (£23,740 to £29,060), the Kia Cee’d (£12,769 to £15,980) and the Dacia Sandero Stepway (£10,450 to £12,360).

The biggest fall in value was seen in the Range Rover Evoque, which dropped considerably from an average sale value of £30,000 to just £24,710 over the past year. The Audi Q4 e-tron, Kia Sportage Hybrid, Polestar 2 EV and Nissan Qashqai all likewise underwent large drops of between £2,400 and £5,000 in value.

Proactive approach

Fisher suggested that policyholders should take a pro-active approach to managing changes to their vehicles, with insurers likewise benefiting – operationally as well as financially – from accurate vehicle data.

He explained: “Policyholders can stay up to date with vehicle price movements by requesting a revaluation at renewal rather than auto-renewing on last year’s figure. Market data is freely available, and fluctuations can be sizeable.

“Insurers using live valuation data can provide point-in-time retail replacement values, giving policyholders a defensible, evidenced basis for their declared value should a claim arise.”

Traditionally, he added, insurers have not done enough to highlight how a customer’s underlying data points may have changed at renewal. While this is changing with new FCA guidelines, he doesn’t believe it should be viewed as an obligation, but rather as a positive force for business growth.

“Currently insurers don’t do enough to help policyholders understand the impact of valuation changes. However, the FCA’s Consumer Duty makes this increasingly hard to ignore,” Fisher concluded.

“Proactively communicating that a vehicle’s value has changed and what that means at the point of settlement is both a fair outcomes obligation and good business practice. Policyholders who feel informed and valued are more likely to renew. Getting this right serves the customer, the relationship and the insurer’s own book.”