Ultimate guide to buying a car

Your best dealers & breakdown providers, plus new-car deals

FOR decades, if you wanted to buy a new car, you’d head to your local main dealer. Or if you were willing to take the time to get an even better deal, maybe you’d travel a little farther. But the process would almost always involve you visiting a dealership and sitting in front of a sales person.

It’s still a route that the majority of new-car buyers go down today, because it’s a familiar process and generally well understood. Of course, the level of service you might receive, as you’ll read over the coming pages, may vary, but new-car buyers are generally a pretty satisfied bunch.

Covid has forced many car manufacturers and retailers to think a little differently. While some brands dabbled with end-to-end new car retailing operations, their hands were forced last year. Indeed, brands which embraced online car sales could still sell. The proof? In December, the Tesla Model 3 was Britain’s best-selling new car; the firm has long preferred the internet as its route to market.

So how do you buy a car online? Although each manufacturer differs, it’s generally as simple as it sounds: navigate to your chosen manufacturer’s website, select the car you want in the specification you’d like, enter the details of your part-exchange and arrange the finance online. You can usually choose to have the car delivered to your home, or collect it from your local dealer.

There are other websites who are able to supply brand-new cars, which aren’t tied to specific manufacturers. Alongside its used car listings, our sister title BuyaCar.co.uk does precisely this. At the time of writing, BuyaCar featured more than 2,180 new cars from 37 manufacturers, all of which can be sorted by list price or monthly cost, making it easier than ever to compare lots of models side-by-side.

“Covid has forced many car manufacturers and retailers to think a little differently”