Carwow UK Scraper | Enterprise-Grade Vehicle Data Extractor

An industrial-strength scraper designed to extract pristine, database-ready vehicle listings from Carwow UK. Built for dealerships, market analysts, and BI teams who need reliable data without the headache of dirty JSONs, duplicate listings, or WAF blocks.

Why Choose This Scraper?

Unlike basic scrapers that break on dynamic UIs or return messy text, this Actor is engineered for Data Quality and Resilience. It bypasses expensive headless browsers by directly reverse-engineering Carwow UK's Hotwire/Turbo-Frame architecture, making it incredibly fast and cost-effective.

Key Features & Technical Superiority

• Smart EV Handling: Flawlessly differentiates between ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) and EVs. Returns exact engine sizes (e.g., 2.0L) for petrol/diesel, and intelligently sets engine_size: null for electric vehicles to keep your database clean.
• Anti-Ghosting (VRM Deduplication): Dealerships often post the same physical car multiple times. This scraper uses VRMs (License Plates) as the ultimate source of truth to drop duplicate ghost listings.
• Make/Model Decoupling: Uses longest-prefix matching to accurately split complex slugs (e.g., land-rover-range-rover-evoque) into structured data.
• Dynamic Body Type Normalization: Fixes frontend dealership typos automatically (e.g., mapping misclassified SUVs back to their correct category).
• WAF/Anti-Bot Resilience: Utilizes advanced techniques and strictly enforces Residential Proxies to minimize 429 Too Many Requests errors.

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Operating Modes: Fast vs. Deep Scan

To help you optimize your Apify proxy costs, this scraper offers two distinct operational modes:

1. Fast Mode (Shallow Crawl): * Best for: Price monitoring, inventory discovery, and market trends.

   • How it works: Extracts data strictly from the Product Listing Page (PLP) payload. Skips extra HTTP requests.
   • Output: Captures core specs (Price, Year, Mileage, Make, Fast Specs, Cover Image).

2. Deep Mode (VDP Crawl): * Best for: Deep valuations, option lists, and building full catalogs.

   • How it works: Navigates into each Vehicle Detail Page (VDP) with exponential backoff.
   • Output: Includes everything in Fast Mode, PLUS exact License Plates (VRM), Dealership Names, top 50 filtered feature options, and full high-res 20-image galleries.

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Ideal Use Cases

• Dealerships: Track competitor pricing and inventory turnover in real-time.
• Automotive Pricing Engines: Feed clean, normalized JSONs directly into your valuation algorithms.
• Insurance & Finance: Monitor market values for specific model years and trims.

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Input Configuration

This Actor is highly customizable. Here are the primary input parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
makes	Array	List of target brands/models (e.g., ["volkswagen golf", "tesla model y"]).
max_items	Integer	Maximum number of cars to scrape across all brands.
deep_mode	Boolean	Toggle between Deep VDP scanning (true) or Fast PLP scanning (false).
condition	String	Filter by used, new, or all.
min_year / max_year	Integer	Set the manufacturing year boundaries.
proxyConfiguration	Object	Residential Proxies are highly recommended for stability.

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Sample Output (Pristine JSON)

The output is strongly typed and normalized, ready for immediate SQL/NoSQL ingestion:

{
    "id": "2f23112c9c4b71d61aec4b9a86cf5ba1",
    "url": "[https://quotes.carwow.co.uk/deals/](https://quotes.carwow.co.uk/deals/)...",
    "title": "Tesla Model Y",
    "price": 31705,
    "currency": "GBP",
    "year": 2022,
    "mileage": 20282,
    "color": "Multi coat - pearl white",
    "transmission": "Automatic",
    "fuel_type": "Electric",
    "engine_size": null, 
    "body_type": "SUV",
    "registration_plate": "WM72COH",
    "full_options": [
        "15\" Touchscreen display",
        "Adaptive cruise control",
        "Lane departure warning system"
    ],
    "image_urls": [
        "[https://carwow-uk-1.imgix.net/](https://carwow-uk-1.imgix.net/)..."
    ],
    "is_electric": true,
    "is_hybrid": false,
    "seller_name": "Premium EVs London",
    "is_new": false,
    "scraped_at": "2026-05-22T11:55:33Z",
    "is_detailed_scan": true
}

Important Usage Notes & Best Practices

1. Proxy Usage: Carwow has strict Cloudflare protections. You MUST use Apify Residential Proxies. Datacenter proxies will likely result in empty datasets or blocked requests.
2. Rate Limiting: The scraper includes built-in dynamic delays and exponential backoffs. Please do not set the concurrency excessively high, as it may trigger WAF bans. A concurrency of 5-10 is the sweet spot.
3. Data Completeness: Unregistered (Brand New) cars naturally will not have a VRM or mileage. The scraper intelligently assigns 0 to mileage and "NOT REGISTERED" to the plate to prevent database null-pointer exceptions.