United Kingdom Sale or Transfer of a Vehicle to the Motor Trade (V5C)

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice. It documents the provenance of the published fields and flow and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-02

The document was derived from and cross-checked against the official sources below, but the full field-by-field comparison the practice requires (manual-source-review-v1 → Procedure step 2) has not yet been completed and recorded against every screen of the live online service — the service could only be exercised up to and including vehicle look-up (see "What was directly observed vs. inferred" below). It therefore remains draft, not verified.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): gb/dvla/transfer-vehicle-to-trade / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.3.0
• Authority: Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).
• Primary source URL: https://www.gov.uk/sold-bought-vehicle — the GOV.UK smart-answer wizard "Tell DVLA you've sold, transferred or bought a vehicle". Fetched live (curl, raw HTML, HTTP 200, no block), 2026-07-02, resubmitting the wizard's own GET-based response parameter down the "sold it" → "sold it to a motor trader" branch (the sibling "sold it privately" branch is modelled separately in gb/dvla/vehicle-keeper-change-v5c, GOV-620). The terminal guidance page ("Sold your vehicle into the motor trade") and its outbound link to the relevant DVLA digital service were captured directly.
• Online service (motor-trade path, modelled here): https://transfer-vehicle-to-trade.service.gov.uk/seller — "Sold a vehicle to the motor trade", a DVLA Beta digital service, distinct from change-private-vehicle-sale.service.gov.uk (used by gb/dvla/vehicle-keeper-change-v5c) but built on the same shared component library (form field names share the wizard_shared_* prefix, versus that service's wizard_change_keeper_*). Fetched live, 2026-07-02, walking the flow screen by screen with a real session cookie and CSRF authenticity_token replayed at each step:
  1. "Provide trader details" — unauthenticated start screen. Captured the exact <input> name/id/maxLength for traderName. POSTed a fabricated trader name ("Acme Motor Traders Ltd") and advanced.
  2. "Find trader's address" — a genuine UK postcode-lookup screen. Captured the exact <input> name/id/maxLength/input-mask for the house-number and postcode inputs. POSTed a real, well-known UK postcode (SW1A 1AA, Buckingham Palace) and received five real candidate addresses back from DVLA's live address-lookup API (Buckingham Palace, London, SW1A 1AA and four sub-addresses at the same postcode) — confirming this step calls a genuine third-party address API, not a stub.
  3. "Select trader address" — selected the first candidate (selected_address_id query parameter on a plain link, not a form POST) and advanced.
  4. "Details of the vehicle being sold" — captured the exact <input> name/id/maxLength/input-mask for vehicleRegistrationNumber and v5cDocumentReferenceNumber.
  5. A POST with a fabricated registration number (AB12CDE) and V5C reference number (12345678901) was submitted (session cookie + CSRF token replayed correctly) to exercise the service end to end, per this cycle's "complete a test run with valid example mock data" instruction. The service correctly redirected to /seller/dropout/unable-to-find-vehicle, whose page text confirms it validates the pair against DVLA's live vehicle record — there is no public test/sandbox mode, and this schema does not attempt to guess or brute-force a real UK vehicle's registration/V5C pair to progress further (that would mean probing a live government record-matching system with invented identifiers, which this review treats as out of scope for a reference-schema authoring pass regardless of technical feasibility).
  6. A capture-trader-email-confirmation route exists between steps 1 and 2 in the URL scheme but auto-redirected straight through with no visible form on this run (no trader email is collected in this flow — plausibly a conditional screen this review's fabricated trader name never triggered).
• Official form id: V5C (the vehicle log book itself). The guidance also references the log book's yellow "sell, transfer or part-exchange your vehicle to the motor trade" perforated section as the paper-channel equivalent of this online notification; that section was not independently opened or extracted (postal fallback, out of scope — see "Scope" below).
• Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-07-02 (all sources confirmed live at authoring time).
• Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (Standards Engineer — initial authoring source review).

What was directly observed vs. inferred

| Field | Basis | |---|---| | traderName | Directly observed: exact <input> name, id, maxLength from the live, unauthenticated "Provide trader details" screen's HTML. | | traderAddressLine1, traderAddressTown, traderPostcode | Directly observed end to end: the postcode-lookup input's exact name/id/maxLength/input-mask were captured, a real postcode was submitted to DVLA's live address-lookup API, and a genuine resolved address ("Buckingham Palace, London, SW1A 1AA") was returned and selected — a stronger sourcing basis than a guidance-inferred address (contrast gb/dvla/vehicle-keeper-change-v5c's newKeeperAddress* fields, which could not be screen-verified because that service's flow reaches its own wall before any address screen). | | vehicleRegistrationNumber, v5cDocumentReferenceNumber | Directly observed: exact <input> name, id, maxLength, and input-mask class from the live "Details of the vehicle being sold" screen's HTML, and exercised end to end with a POST that produced the expected live-record-validation rejection. | | sellerEmailAddress | Inferred, not directly observed as a screen field. The vehicle-lookup step is the last screen of the online service this review could reach (see above); the wizard's own guidance page for this branch states "You'll be sent: an email confirmation (if you gave your email address)", which requires an email-capture screen to exist somewhere past the point this review reached. This is the schema's weakest sourcing point and the first thing a future revision should firm up once the service can be exercised past vehicle look-up (e.g. with an authorised test vehicle, if DVLA ever publishes one, or via direct confirmation from DVLA). |

Discrepancy noted, not resolved: the live rejection page for v5cDocumentReferenceNumber describes the number as coming from the V5C's yellow "sell, transfer or part-exchange your vehicle to the motor trade" section, while the field's own on-screen label calls it the general "Latest V5C registration certificate (logbook) document reference number" (the same wording used by the private-sale service). Both plausibly refer to the one document-reference number printed on the current V5C, but this review could not confirm that with an authorised test vehicle — flagged in the field's description for a future reviewer to resolve.

Scope and jurisdiction notes

• Whole of the United Kingdom. DVLA's vehicle registration function is UK-wide; jurisdiction.country is GB per registry convention for gb/dvla/* sibling entries.
• Seller-initiated only. This schema models the person giving up the vehicle notifying DVLA — not the trader's own registration/stock-in steps.
• Private, person-to-person sale or gift is out of scope. DVLA runs a distinct digital service for that, change-private-vehicle-sale.service.gov.uk, already modelled as gb/dvla/vehicle-keeper-change-v5c (GOV-620).
• The postal, no-log-book fallback is out of scope. When a seller has no V5C to reference, the wizard's guidance directs a paper channel instead (perforated yellow section, or a letter to DVLA Swansea with name/address, registration number, make and model, exact date of sale, and the trader's name/address) — a different (postal) channel, not a description of what the online service asks for.
• Vehicle tax is out of scope. The guidance states tax is cancelled and any refund is calculated automatically once DVLA is notified; no tax-related input is collected by this schema (see the already-published gb/dvla/vehicle-tax for the separate tax process).
• Scrapyard/insurance/finance-company sales share this same online service per the wizard's own guidance prose ("This includes an insurance company, finance company, scrap yard or any car buying service") — modelled as a single traderName field rather than a separate transaction-type distinction, since the guidance draws no functional difference between these counterparties for this notification.

Path to a verified claim (next step)

To advance to status: verified, a reviewer applies manual-source-review-v1 (Procedure step 2) field-by-field against the live transfer-vehicle-to-trade.service.gov.uk flow using a genuine, authorised UK vehicle and V5C reference number (the one blocker this cycle could not clear), confirms or corrects the inferred sellerEmailAddress field and the v5cDocumentReferenceNumber discrepancy noted above, resolves any discrepancy by shipping a new schema version (immutability — VERSIONING §3, practice Procedure step 5), and records the outcome here plus sets status: verified with a current verification.lastVerifiedAt/ nextReviewBy.

Re-verification

Per the practice's Cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2027-01-01 (6 months). Re-check the source on or before that date and on any source.url change.