Motorpoint tops the best online discounts Which? can find

Investigators at the Consumers’ Association’s magazine Which? have confirmed new car buyers can make significant savings by ordering online and gave a ringing endorsement to purchasing cars this way.

Which? Motoring Editor Richard Headland said: “We found that shopping around online is simpler than negotiating with dealers yourself and, in most cases, we obtained a better price. You can save hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds by shopping this way.”
But there are even bigger car price savings to be had on the internet if you know where to look.

The Which? team compared prices using only internet car brokers to find the best online deal on fifteen popular cars. Overall, the exercise delivered an average saving of 11% against the list price.

Motorpoint – the UK’s leading car supermarket group – is not an online broker but it does operate an award-winning web site where new car buyers can browse for their chosen model to compare price.

Among the sample cars in the Which? survey was a new Peugeot 308 1.6 VTi S 5-door. According to the survey, the list price for the car is £14,095. The lowest web broker price was £12,275 – a saving of £1,020. Motorpoint has the same model on offer at £11,699. That’s a saving of £2,396 – more than double the best found by the Which? team.

Interestingly, Which? also revealed only 6% of its members have bought a car online, while figures just produced for Motorpoint show that more than 25% of its customers used the internet to make their purchases in 2007.