The used car market doesn’t fail because people are dishonest. It fails because honesty can’t be proved.

Kept is where interesting cars are sold in the open in South Africa, and it exists to fix one thing. A private seller with a genuinely good car has all the information and no way to be believed, so nobody pays for it and they take the trade offer. A dealer has the credibility of the forecourt, the warranty and the presentation without being obliged to disclose anything, so a buyer pays retail for an unknown. The buyer cannot tell the two apart, so every car gets priced as though it might be the bad one. Good cars are underpaid, bad cars are overpaid, and the gap between those two prices ends up in somebody else’s pocket.

So Kept makes disclosure provable, and then lets open bidding do the pricing. A dealer and a private seller get the same questions, the same page and the same room.

We do not inspect cars and we never will, so the photography goes deep, the documents are published, and the service history, the NATIS papers and the invoices go up with the car rather than being described.

The interview runs in two parts. Every seller answers the same six questions, whatever the car. Then our tools generate a second set for that specific model out of what it is documented to do wrong. The rear main seal on an M119, rotor compression on an FD, whether the E30’s boot floor has cracked around the subframe mounts. A Superboss and a 964 are asked genuinely different things.

The full transcript is published with the listing. So is anything the seller declined to answer, in the same place the answer would have been. That last part is the whole mechanism rather than a policy: staying quiet costs the seller something, which is what makes telling you the truth the better move.

The comments open, and the seller is expected to be there. Not a call centre, not us on their behalf, but the person who owns the car, answering the room. A few thousand people who have owned, broken and rebuilt these exact models go through it while the car is open, and they find things. Sellers who won’t do that don’t run on Kept.

This is the part that actually closes the gap. None of the above pays a seller anything on its own. Disclosure is only worth something once a room of enthusiasts competes over what it is worth, in the open, with every one of them looking at the same information. That is the difference between a price and an offer. A private negotiation is settled by whoever knows more; open bidding on a car this well documented is settled by what it is actually worth.

What we publish alongside all of it is a Kept score: our tools read the seller’s answers against what the model is documented to do, and publish a read on the car. It is derived from the transcript, not from a workshop, and it is worth something precisely because the transcript underneath it is public and the seller has to stand behind it in the comments. You can read every answer it was drawn from.

We hold no stock, so nothing we publish about a car is us marking our own homework. That is worth knowing, because the one platform in this market that does inspect is also the one that bought the car and owns it until you take it away. The grader and the seller there are the same company.

We do not run every car. Kept is for cars enthusiasts actually want to look at, and that gate is deliberate: the interview only works where a model’s failure points are documented, the comment thread only works where people have owned the thing, and the bidding only finds the right number when the people bidding already know what the car is. Within that, we’re not chasing a decade or a price bracket. A Superboss and a Citi Golf can sit on the same page. The test is whether the car is interesting, not whether it is old or expensive.