Is there an Autohero API? Used-car prices from nine EU countries in one schema

Autohero is often searched for as if it were a marketplace with a data feed. It is neither: it is a retailer, and it has no public feed. Both facts shape what you can get from it.

The short answer

There is no public, documented Autohero API. The storefronts show their stock to every visitor without a login, and the Autohero Scraper reads that public catalogue and returns it as rows — JSON, CSV or Excel, or through the Apify API. There is no account, no cookie and no checkout path involved; on 10 October 2026, Autohero's robots.txt disallowed six paths for all crawlers — /*/myhero/*, /*/inspection/, /*/checkout/*, /*/identify, /*/center and /*/unsubscribe/* — and the catalogue the Actor reads is not among them. The Actor does not filter by robots.txt, so if a future rule covered the catalogue it would not stop.

What Autohero is, and why that shapes the data

Autohero is AUTO1 Group's online used-car retailer. It sells its own inspected stock through its branches and pickup centres. On 1 October 2026 it listed about 21,500 cars:

Because it is one company's stock, three things follow. The seller is always Autohero — 0 private sellers in 360 detail pages and 1,800 listings — so there is no personal contact data to withhold. Damages and service history come from Autohero's own documentation of its stock, not from a seller's description. And the data describes a retailer's pricing, not a national market: useful as a reference price, misleading as a market average. For a classifieds source in Spain, where dealers and private sellers both post, see the coches.net guide.

Nine markets, three currencies

Poland is priced in złoty and Sweden in kronor; the other seven in euros. Every row carries currency, and the Actor never converts. That is deliberate: a converted price embeds an exchange rate and a date that the source did not publish, and two runs a week apart would disagree for reasons that have nothing to do with cars. Convert at analysis time, with the rate you choose and record.

Even converted, prices are not automatically like-for-like across borders: VAT treatment can differ, and vat_type is on every row so it can be accounted for.

Columns that only exist in some countries

A car row has 130 columns. Measured on 1,642 cars from all nine countries, a median of 65 carry a value without details. Price, monthly payment and its term, mileage, first registration, power, CO2, accidents, damages count and branch are at 100%. Some columns, though, belong to particular markets, and a blended fill rate would describe no country at all:

previous_price and price_drop appear on 6.0% of cars — the ones Autohero has reduced since listing. With car_id stable across runs, a daily schedule turns that into a repricing history per car.

What the detail page adds

includeDetails adds 53 columns, measured on 759 cars. The VIN, body type, colour, tyre season, gallery photos (median 42) and warranty offers with prices are at 100%; the equipment list at 99.7% (median 51 items); documented damages at 96.8%, a median of 20 per car, each with its photo; service history at 96.7%. license_plate is 45.7% overall — 100% in Italy, Spain and Sweden, 52% in the Netherlands. Detail texts stay in the country's language; coded values are mapped to English labels with the raw code beside them.

Filters that need exact names

Autohero's make filter is case-sensitive, and its model filter wants the model exactly as Autohero writes it: Golf VII, not Golf; 3er for a BMW 3 Series. The Actor normalises common make spellings (vw, mercedes) and makes the model case-insensitive, but a partial model name still matches nothing — and the run says so in an uncharged error row instead of returning an empty dataset that looks like a quiet market.

{
  "countries": ["DE", "FR"],
  "fuelTypes": ["diesel"],
  "transmissions": ["automatic"],
  "maxPrice": 20000,
  "maxItems": 300,
  "includeDetails": true
}

Cost and speed

$0.00125 per car, $0.0007 per detail page — charged only when the details actually arrive — and $0.0022 per branch record. A thousand cars cost $1.25, or $1.95 with details. On the platform at 512 MB, 1,000 cars took 23 seconds and 500 cars with details 57 seconds; all 207 branches across the nine countries took about two minutes. Branch mode returns each branch's company phone, opening hours and how many of your filtered cars it holds.

Extracting a substantial part of a database built in the EU can engage the database maker's sui generis right under Directive 96/9/EC, which is one reason the Actor caps a run at 25,000 rows. How the five marketplaces compare on ceilings, sellers and cost is in the five-marketplace comparison.