The elder boy put in his offer for the Model 3 on Sunday afternoon, while we were hoovering dog hair out of the boot: twenty pounds and most of his Lego. He's a good few years off a driving licence, and my partner said the offer would be kept on file.
It did make me wonder what anyone else would pay. The Model Y arrives in February, so if we were ever going to sell the Model 3, this is when. One evening last week I put our registration into a handful of valuation sites and asked Tesla for a trade-in figure on the Model Y order.
The answer, as of October 2026, is that dealers advertise a 2019 Model 3 Long Range with around 70,000 miles at about £14,000 to £15,000. The offers to buy ours came in between about £10,800 and £13,000, depending on how much of the work I was prepared to do myself. We paid £47,900 for it in 2019.
The price on the forecourt
I started with the adverts. On 7 October 2026 Parkers listed 52 used 2019 Model 3s from dealers. The Long Range cars with 56,000 to 59,000 miles were priced from £15,000 to £15,988, and one that had done 141,190 miles was £11,990. On CarGurus the same day, a Long Range All-Wheel Drive with 84,000 miles was £13,295, and the site put the market value of a 2019 Model 3 at £13,075 across 300 listings.
Ours has done a little over 70,000 miles, so on a forecourt it would sit somewhere around £14,000 to £15,000. When I worked out what our Model 3 costs to run, I called it worth about £15,000, going by adverts like these.
That's the price a dealer would ask a buyer, once the car has been cleaned, checked and sold with a warranty. It isn't what the dealer would pay me for it. One advert described a car very like ours as immaculate, which ours hasn't been since its first camping trip.
Offers from the people who'd buy it
The first figure came from an instant-buyer website, about £10,800, subject to an inspection at one of their branches. A site where dealers bid on your car estimated about £12,000 once I'd uploaded photos. A free valuation tool reckoned we'd get about £13,000 selling privately and £11,500 in part-exchange. Tesla's trade-in estimate on our Model Y order landed in the same place, at about £11,500.
These are the figures I got for our car on the same evening in October 2026:
Route | About what we'd get | What it involves |
|---|---|---|
Dealer advert (what a buyer pays) | £14,000 to £15,000 | What a dealer asks once it's prepared |
Private sale | £13,000 | Adverts, strangers, test drives, handling payment |
Dealer bidding site | £12,000 | Photos, then dealers bid and one collects |
Tesla trade-in on the Model Y | £11,500 | Hand over the keys when we collect the new car |
Instant-buyer website | £10,800 | Drive to a branch, accept on the spot |
The gap between the top and bottom is about £2,200, and most of it is the price of convenience. Selling privately means a fortnight of phone calls and test drives and explaining the faint smell of wet dog in the boot. My partner asked whether the boy's offer included the Lego with all its pieces.
The timing isn't bad for selling an electric car. In August, used electric car prices were up 3.8% on a year earlier, their third month of growth in a row, according to Autotrader's latest market report (September 2026). The same report says trade values have softened while prices on forecourts have held steady. That's the gap I was looking at on my spreadsheet.
Where the £36,000 went
Take the middle of those offers, about £12,000, from the £47,900 we paid after the government's £3,500 plug-in grant (Engadget, May 2019), and the car has lost about £36,000 in a little over seven years. That's three-quarters of its price, or roughly £5,000 a year. It's a bit worse than the £33,000 I worked out from adverts for the running costs, because an advert isn't an offer.
That's steep depreciation, and only some of it is age and miles. Tesla resale values have taken a knock from Tesla itself. A new Model 3 Rear-Wheel Drive costs £37,990, almost £10,000 less than we paid, and the Premium Long Range Rear-Wheel Drive is £44,990, with a WLTP range of 466 miles (as of October 2026). When a new car costs less than yours did and goes a lot further, nobody pays much for yours.
A buyer also weighs up what's left on the warranty. A Long Range Model 3's battery and drive unit are covered for 8 years or 120,000 miles (Tesla, as of October 2026), so ours runs out in summer 2027, and the rest of the car's warranty ended years ago. Cars built before the 2021 update have no heat pump either (Discover EV), which buyers who've read about winter range tend to know. The checks I'd want before buying a car like ours are in checking a used Model 3, starting with our own.
The steep part is behind us, at least. A car worth £12,000 can't lose another £36,000, and an older car loses less each year in pounds because it has less left to lose.
Tesla's trade-in, if you're buying new
Tesla's trade-in is the easy option. You enter the registration, VIN and mileage in your Tesla account for an estimate, then send photos through the app once you've ordered and get a firm offer within 48 hours, which holds for 30 days (Tesla UK, as of October 2026). The value comes off the price of the new car, and you hand the old one over at delivery. We'd drive to the delivery centre in the Model 3 and home in the Model Y, with no adverts and no strangers on the drive.
It wasn't the best offer, and I wouldn't expect it to be. It's about £1,500 under a private sale, which is what Tesla charges for doing all the work. If we needed the money towards the Model Y, I'd probably take it, because the alternative is selling the old car privately while waiting for the new one to arrive.
If you're trading in a petrol or diesel car for your first Tesla, it's worth looking at the stock cars as well as building one from scratch. Tesla's ex-demo cars are sold as new, with a new-car warranty, and they come and go in Tesla's new Model 3 and Model Y stock, through our referral link(referral link). A car loses value fastest in its first couple of years, and an ex-demo discount takes a little of that off.
Until the end of December, Tesla is also adding a £3,000 trade-in bonus on selected Rear-Wheel Drive trims ordered from 1 October, taken off the new car's price rather than added to the trade-in value (Tesla UK, as of October 2026). Our order went in before it started.
Staying on the drive
We're keeping it. £11,500 to £13,000 isn't enough to replace what the Model 3 does for us, which is the school run and my partner's commute every weekday, charged on the drive overnight for a few pence a mile. Anything we bought for that money would be a car of about the same age that we know nothing about. The battery has lost about 10% of its range in seven years, and the app calls that normal.
If we were selling, I'd do it before summer 2027, while the battery warranty still has some months to run, and I'd sell privately if I could face the phone calls. I'd also get several offers on the same evening, as I did, and treat the dealer adverts as the ceiling rather than the value. The elder boy's offer stays on file, and he has been told it will need to go up.
If this would be your first Tesla, ordering a new Model 3 or Model Y through our referral link(referral link) gets you 650 free Supercharging miles (as of October 2026). Use it before you place the order, because Tesla can't add it afterwards, and it doesn't apply to used cars.
