If you've typed honestjohn.co.uk into your browser recently and landed on a car sales site you've never heard of, you're not going mad and you didn't mistype it. Honest John closed in August 2026, quietly, after 25 years. I used that site for years before this one existed, so this page is two things: an honest account of what happened, and a guide to where every part of it lives now, including the parts we're bringing back.
What happened to the Honest John website?
Honest John shut down as a standalone site in August 2026, and every page on honestjohn.co.uk now redirects to Drive.co.uk, a car marketplace backed by Volkswagen Financial Services. There was no farewell post and no wind-down period. One week the site was carrying news, reviews and advice as normal, the next it was gone, and readers found out from the redirect.
The short version of how it got there: the site launched in 2000, built around the Honest John agony column format, and became one of the UK's most trusted places for plain-spoken car buying advice. Heycar bought it in February 2020, and the brand ended up registered to Volkswagen Financial Services DS (UK) Limited, which also backs Drive. In August 2026 the site was folded into Drive and switched off.
Where has all the Honest John content gone?
Some of it moved, most of it didn't. Drive's own announcement says the car reviews are being republished in its reviews section, the Ask HJ question format "isn't continuing", and anything judged out of date is "being retired rather than kept around indefinitely". In practice, here's the feature-by-feature picture:
| What Honest John had | What happened to it | Where to look now |
|---|---|---|
| Car reviews | Moved to Drive.co.uk | Drive's reviews section |
| Good & Bad (known faults by model) | Retired, not migrated | Rebuilt free on our common problems pages, with 593 faults researched from the archived Good & Bad pages. The Wayback Machine holds the originals |
| Real MPG (real-world fuel economy) | Retired, not migrated | Rebuilt free at /real-mpg, 776 models with the official figures alongside. The old tables are readable in the Wayback Machine |
| Ask HJ answers archive | Format discontinued | The Wayback Machine |
| The MOT Files (pass rates by model) | Retired | We're rebuilding it from DVSA's open MOT data |
| Forum | Gone | Nowhere |
The reviews were arguably the most replaceable part, because every motoring site reviews cars. The parts that made Honest John genuinely hard to replace were the Good & Bad pages and Real MPG: decades of accumulated owner reports about what actually goes wrong and what cars actually return to the gallon, rather than what the brochure claims. Those are the parts that didn't move.
What is the advert not telling you?
Paste the advert text and the registration. We read it against the car's DVSA MOT history and our known-faults database, then tell you what the seller left out.
Check an advert now (free) →Can I still read the old Honest John pages?
Yes. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine crawled Honest John for years, and snapshots of most of the popular pages survive, including Good & Bad pages and Real MPG tables captured within months of the closure.
Go to web.archive.org and paste in the old Honest John address you're after, or as much of it as you remember. The archive shows you a calendar of captured dates, and you pick one from before August 2026. If you don't remember the exact address, searching Google for the page often still turns up the old URL in the result, even though clicking it now bounces you to Drive. Copy the address rather than clicking it, and feed it to the archive instead.
It's slower than the real site was, some pages are missing, and images sometimes don't load. But the words are there, and for a one-off check on a car you're about to view, it works.
What's happened to Real MPG?
We rebuilt it, and it's free.
Real MPG deserves a moment, because it was quietly one of the most useful datasets in UK motoring. Official fuel economy figures are laboratory numbers, and everyone who has ever owned a car knows the gap between the brochure and the pump. Honest John collected real figures from real drivers for years and published the averages next to the official numbers, so you could see that a car claiming 55 mpg really did about 43. That entire dataset was retired with the site.
The aggregate tables survive in public archives, and the official laboratory figures are published as open data by the government's Vehicle Certification Agency, so we pulled all of it together into a free section: CarAdCheck Real MPG. We recovered the archived Honest John dataset page by page, kept the official NEDC and WLTP figures alongside the owner-reported averages for every engine, and rebuilt it as one free page per model with a section for each generation. 776 models across 48 makes, 510 of them with a full page, built on more than 319,000 owner submissions, and the thinner models sit on their make page so nothing published has been lost. Submissions are open again too, the same way Honest John built it the first time round. If you'd rather see the original, every model page links to the archived Honest John page it came from, and there's more detail in Honest John Real MPG is back.
Two promises on it. It will always be free, because the whole point of this kind of data is that everyone can check it. That goes for all of it, the fault data and the MOT pass rates included: the rebuilt data lives on free pages, not behind the report. And your numbers will build it: every model page has a simple form to submit what your car actually does, no postcode and no account, and submissions are folded into the averages in batches.
Where do I check known faults now Good & Bad has gone?
Honest John's Good & Bad pages were 25 years of owner reports, and I'm not going to pretend anything replaces that overnight, ours included. What we have is built differently: a known-faults database covering 41 makes and 736 documented faults, carrying 2,103 advert warning phrases, every entry sourced, dated and badged rather than anonymously crowdsourced. 593 of those faults came out of the archived Good & Bad pages themselves, which is a story of its own in where the Good & Bad fault data lives now. You can browse it free on our common problems pages, where the VW Golf known faults and Nissan Qashqai known faults pages will give you a feel for the depth. And it won't stay bad news only. Honest John's pages always balanced the good against the bad, and we're doing the same: the things each model genuinely gets right are being added alongside the faults, free to browse like the rest.
The bigger difference is what the data gets used for. A Good & Bad page told you what the model goes wrong with, then left you to cross-reference the specific car yourself. Our free scan does the cross-referencing: paste the advert, and it reads the seller's exact wording against the car's full MOT history and the known faults for that model, then tells you what's missing, what's due at that mileage, and which phrases in the advert deserve a follow-up question. The free version runs without a card or a password. A Smart Check on top of that explains every finding rather than just the biggest one, prices up the model's known faults, and gives you the seller questions and a negotiation figure, and a free report upgrades on the same link without re-running anything.
Worth being straight about the limits, because Honest John usually was: no database, ours or anyone's, can see unrecorded accident damage or judge the quality of a past repair. Those still need eyes on the car. What a good check does is make sure the trip is worth making, and arm you for it. If you're weighing up what the free layer of checking gets you generally, we've written up what a free car check covers, and if it's the advert itself that feels off, start with the advert red flags guide.
Will Honest John ever come back?
There's no sign of it. The brand is registered to Volkswagen Financial Services, the site's traffic now feeds Drive's marketplace, and companies rarely resurrect a property they've just folded. The name might reappear on something one day, because it's a valuable name, but the site as readers knew it, with the archive that made it useful, is finished.
What can come back is the data, because the useful parts of it were always about the cars rather than the brand. The fault patterns, the real-world economy figures and the MOT pass rates are all reconstructable from public archives and official open data, and that's the work we've started. It's a shame it took the site dying to make that obvious, but the alternative is letting 25 years of accumulated knowledge about what actually goes wrong with cars quietly rot in an archive, and that helps nobody.
