The car buying firm sent emails to consumers in January and February 2016 inclduing the following ad:

“Beat the price drop! The car market is entering a busy period which means now could be a good time to sell your [car] … REMEMBER: The value of your [car] could be a lot less in 3 months’ time*”.

A graph showed how cars would depreciate in value and small print at the bottom said it was for “illustration purposes only”.

Three recipients complained that the mailshot was misleading as the graph wasn’t clear and they felt it exaggerated how much a car’s value would depreciate over three months.

Two of the complainants also believed that the graph showed that the depreciation in the value of a car would accelerate over time, again challenging whether this was misleading.

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In its response, We Buy Any Car said it sent thousands of emails similar to this one each month and stated that it is a universally accepted principle that car values generally depreciate over time, especially as new number plate releases approach.

It also added that the graph couldn’t strictly be called a graph as it didn’t include a scale or any monetary values.

However, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld the complaints, acknowledging that as the illustration didn’t show a relationship between two sets of values but did include a line linking the axes, the “average consumer would identify it as a graph” showing that car values depreciated at a rapid and accelerating rate.

The ASA added the asterisk beneath the graph with the small print would be “likely to be overlooked by the majority of recipients” and it didn’t believe there was sufficient evidence of cars depreciating rapidly over a three month period.

In its report, the ASA concluded: “We considered that to present a curve that suggested such a trend in the context of claims about the effects of various factors, some of them short term, was likely to mislead readers. Therefore, we concluded that the implied claim that car values depreciated rapidly at an increasing rate had not been substantiated and was misleading.”

It told We Buy Any Car that the ad must not appear again in the form complained about. It must also not use visual representations in its advertising in future which are likely to mislead consumers.