🏁 PistonHeads Car Classifieds Scraper

🚀 Pull UK performance and enthusiast car listings from PistonHeads in seconds. Filter by make, model, price band, year, mileage, fuel type, body style, and seller type. No API key, no login, no manual CSV wrangling.

PistonHeads is the UK's home for performance, classic, and enthusiast cars. The site lists everything from a £1,200 project car to a £4.8M Ferrari FXX, with a strong mix of specialist independent dealers, marque-authorised retailers, and private sellers. This scraper turns the live PistonHeads classifieds into a structured dataset you can load into a spreadsheet, a notebook, or a database in one run.

You give the scraper a search URL or a few filter fields, and it returns every matching listing with prices, mileage, year, specifications (body type, fuel, transmission, colour, engine power and displacement), seller details (name, location, trade or private), pricing model (regular, POA, online auction), and the full gallery of high-resolution images. Behind the scenes it talks to the same JSON search service that powers the PistonHeads buy pages, so the data is identical to what the site shows, just delivered in bulk.

🎯 Target Audience	📌 Primary Use Cases
Performance and specialist car dealers	Pricing comparisons across rivals and trim levels
Classic and import brokers	Spotting underpriced cars or import opportunities
Market researchers and analysts	Tracking depreciation curves on enthusiast segments
Lead-gen and CRM teams	Building dealer prospect lists with verified locations
Insurance and warranty firms	Modelling market values for niche makes and models

📋 What the PistonHeads Scraper does

• 🏷️ Live classified pricing. Every active classified, online auction, and price-on-application listing the site exposes today.
• 🔎 Granular filters. Make, model keyword, price band, year, mileage, fuel, transmission, body, colour, drivetrain, seller type, postcode radius, and listing type.
• 🖼️ Full image galleries. Both the headline image and the complete imageUrls array, ready to embed in a CRM or dashboard.
• 🏢 Dealer vs private split. A sellerType flag plus seller name and location for every record, so you can segment trade and private inventory.
• 🧭 URL or form input. Paste a PistonHeads search URL straight from your browser, or build the query in the structured input fields.
• 🏆 Auction-aware. Listings sold via the PistonHeads online auction are flagged with isAuction and pricingModel: OnlineAuction.

Each record contains the listing title and URL, an internal advert id, the price (with a formatted display string and pricing-model code), the make and model, year, mileage, full specification block (body type, colour, fuel, transmission, engine power in bhp, engine displacement in cc), the seller's display name, type (Trade or Private), and location, and the complete gallery of full-size images. A scrapedAt ISO timestamp captures when the row was harvested.

💡 Why it matters: PistonHeads has long been the place where UK enthusiast cars first appear before they hit the wider marketplace. Owning a clean, refreshable dataset of these listings is an edge for dealers, brokers, and analysts who would otherwise be paging through results one screen at a time.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: badges, bodyType, brandType, colour, currency, enginePower, engineSize, fuelType, headline, id, imageUrl, imageUrls, isAuction, isPriceOnApplication, isVatOmitted, make, mileage, model, price, priceLabel, pricingModel, scrapedAt, sellerIsOnlineRetailer, sellerLocation, sellerName, sellerType, transmission, url, year. All 29 field names come from a real production run, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

⚠️ Good to Know: URL parameters always win over the structured fields. If you paste a search URL with priceMax=20000 and also set priceMax: 50000 in the form, the URL value wins. Leave fields blank if you want the URL to drive the run entirely.

🚀 How to use

1. 🆕 Open a free Apify account. Sign up at console.apify.com/sign-up?fpr=vmoqkp.
2. 🔍 Find the actor. Search "PistonHeads" in the Apify Store and open this actor's page.
3. ⚙️ Set your filters. Either paste a PistonHeads search URL or pick make, price band, year, and sort order in the form.
4. ▶️ Run. Click Start. The default preview run returns 10 listings on the free plan, up to 1,000,000 on a paid plan.
5. 💾 Export. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML, or read it through the Apify API.

⏱️ Total time: less than a minute from "I need this data" to a downloadable spreadsheet.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• 🚙 Autotrader Scraper - Pull listings from the largest UK and US used-car classifieds platform.
• 📰 Gumtree Cars Scraper - UK private and trade classifieds with prices, specs, and seller info.
• 🔨 Cars & Bids Scraper - Online auction data for modern enthusiast cars.
• 🌐 JamesEdition Cars Listings - Global luxury and supercar marketplace data.
• 📋 CARFAX Used Cars Scraper - Used-car listings paired with vehicle-history context.

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more scrapers covering automotive, real estate, marketplaces, and lead generation.

⚖️ Disclaimer: This actor accesses publicly available content from PistonHeads.com. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by PistonHeads or any of its parent companies. Use it in line with the site's terms of use and the laws of your jurisdiction. The actor authors take no responsibility for downstream use of the collected data.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.