New data reveals your top new-car dealers
CAR makers put in enormous effort when developing a new model, ensuring it meets or exceeds all the relevant safety requirements, emits as few pollutants as possible, performs well in all weather conditions and is a robust, reliable vehicle that’s good to drive and appealing to look at. All of this is done, firms hope, in the expectation that a new car will hit the spot with its target market and stand out from the competition enough to sell in good numbers.
All of this takes many years and billions of pounds to achieve, yet it can seem almost all for nothing if the final link in the chain – the dealer – fails to fulfil its role properly. Because for many people, it doesn’t matter if a new car ticks all the right boxes: if you have a bad experience with a dealer or service centre, that may be enough to put you off ever buying the same car again, or even returning to the brand.
Think of it like a restaurant: the food on offer could be the best you’ve ever tasted, but if the waiters and waitresses ignore you, forget dishes, drop a bowl of soup on your lap and then overcharge you, would you go back?
Here, we bring you the best-performing dealers based on the scores of thousands of new-car buyers. We’ve made some significant changes for 2021, so while the 21 firms whose dealers are represented here are slightly fewer than we would ideally like, largely due to lockdowns, these assessments are as comprehensive as you’ll get in the UK. We hope you find them useful.
A note on your verbatim comments
WE typically include a blend of your comments when we compile our reports, mixing good and bad feedback, particularly at the lower end of our rankings.
This year, however, it’s positive all the way when it comes to your dealership experiences. That’s not because we’re trying to sugar-coat things or put on rose-tinted spectacles, but simply because the vast majority of the written feedback you provided was complimentary.
This chimes in with the scores you’ve awarded the showrooms and service centres you used this year, with even our bottom-rated dealer scoring more than 80 per cent in terms of customer satisfaction, and barely a 10 per cent margin between our top and bottom-ranked entries in this year’s survey.
So while some companies’ dealers don’t seem to have done that well this year in terms of their standings, it seems that’s not because some dealers are bad, but that ones sitting above them in our rundown are so good.
What’s new for 2021?
WE’VE been introducing a round of improvements to mark 20 years of our Driver Power surveys, and the dealer rundown is no different. To give you a clearer idea of how each brand’s outlets perform, we’ve split the scores so that the retail, or showroom, side of things gets one set of marks, and the service centre side gets another.
Each of these two areas gets its own set of four categories, with these category
