Give A Car: Easy charity fundraising?

[aricooperdavis]

TLDR: Charities can sign up for free to GiveACar.co.uk and people can donate the proceeds of the sale/scrap of their car. No caving charities make the most of this yet, but if you do before Christmas then I'll donate my car to you!​

I've finally decided to do the kind thing and end the suffering of my Clio. She was a good first car, in the sense that I have learnt a lot about car maintenance, troubleshooting, and repair.

In all other respects she was next to useless.

She is out of MOT and won't pass her next one without throwing a lot of money at her, and I'm fed up of replacing one part only for another to give up the ghost in a couple of months time. Her only value, realistically, is scrap, and that quote is pretty terrible anyway since she'd need to be towed to the breakers yard.

So I'm going to donate Rusty to charity using GiveACar.co.uk.

This website collects your car and auctions it off, or sells it to scrapyards, with the money going to a charity of your choice. They already have the infrastructure available to be able to do this cheaply, so they can make much more money from your car than you can if you sold it yourself.

This seems like a fantastic opportunity to raise money for one of the many Cave Rescue Organisations in the UK, or the Ghar Parau Foundation, or the British Cave Research Association, but there are no cave related charities on there! It's free and really easy to sign your charity up to benefit! The only thing that you have to do in return is send a receipt to the car donor to acknowledge that their donation went to the right place.

If any caving related charity is going to sign up before Christmas then let me know and I'll donate to you, otherwise I'm going to be supporting the Great North Air Ambulance Service. It's nice to know that, unlike most of her life with me, Rusty's demise might be of use to someone.

 

[DCRO]

That's very generous, and thanks for bringing this to our attention  .

DCRO are now 'in the system', just need to wait for them to tell us which hoops to jump through before we will be listed. It might take a while.

 

[aricooperdavis]

Brilliant!  Well you've taken it, and if it takes too long to get you on the system then I'll donate it somewhere else and match what it goes for as a donation to DCRO.

 

[Spike]

I'd only suggest using this sort of scheme for cars that are really properly clapped out and can't even be driven to a scrapyard.

I had an old Corsa, that while it had it's foibles, would still have been useful to someone as a little runabout etc. Having read the literature on one of these companies' web-sites (Charity Car), I expected it to be taken away and sold at auction where it might raise a couple of hundred quid. Some would be skimmed off by the people who collected/auctioned it etc, and the rest would make a decent donation to the charity I chose.

I can't remember how much the quote was through when I agreed to it, but when the guy came to collect he said he would be taking it straight to the scrapyard where it would be crushed and weighed in. I later got an email through saying Cancer Research had got a donation of ?32. At this point I felt proper cheated - I could just have easily driven the car to the scrappy myself and got more than that to donate to charity, or auctioned/sold it on to someone who could have got more use out of it for three figures and donated that.

Essentially, my opinion of these sort of companies is now unpostable. If you really have no way of scrapping the vehicle yourself then fine, but realistically if you want the charity to get any real money - you need to put the work in yourself. As always, your mileage may vary (pun intended), but I wouldn't go near one of these charlatans again.

 

[aricooperdavis]

I'm sorry to hear it Spike, that must have been disheartening! In my case I haven't had a quote more than ?32 as it would need to be towed to the nearest scrapyard anyway, which cuts its value considerably. It's not even suitable to be a little runabout Still, I'll see if I can find a local breakers who'll take it first, for a reasonable sum.

 

[PeteHall]

I scrapped a Ford Ka a few years ago. The scrappy turned up from 10 miles away, craned it onto his lorry and paid me ?80.

I can't claim to have given the ?80 to charity, instead I used it to buy a new gearbox for my Land Rover, from the same scrappy!

 

[DCRO]

Just to update you, DCRO is now listed - though we are not responsible for the text on the listing, that is all down to their marketing department.

 

[darren]

Last time I scrapped a car I used https://www.motorwise.com/index.cfm

Paid me 3 times (?240 in total) the amount quoted by all local scrap yards. Car didn't have MOT.  When car was collected lorry driver said they had huge recycling facility mostly reducing car to raw materials, even reclining copper from wires.