15 Years Of New Car Deals
Published Date: 31st Oct 2018
UK Car Discount is celebrating the milestone of 15 years of delivering new car deals to its customers.
From humble beginnings in 2003 operating out of a small office in Manchester to our own two-story building in Altrincham, Cheshire in 2018 the company remains true its core values of delivering a first-class, friendly, ‘no pressure’ service and the best possible discounts.
New car buyers can take advantage of deals usually amounting to £1000s in savings off list prices, all from the comfort of their home.
Back in 2003 one of the biggest hurdles for UK Car Discount was gaining the confidence of would-be customers, after all buying a new car on the internet was a completely alien concept. That’s why UK Car Discount quickly adopted the business model of taking just a nominal deposit from customers and only asking them to pay for their new vehicle after deliver and once they have checked the vehicle and are completely satisfied, this way people could see we were a professional, trustworthy company.
Customers also have the comfort of knowing all vehicles are source from UK dealers and as such offer the same warranty and cover you get if walking into and buying from your local main dealer. We deliver free of charge to most parts of mainland UK too.
In more recent years we’ve also adopted TrustPilot as our impartial, third-party review platform and have amassed 404 customer reviews with an overall score of 9.5/10 and a rating of ‘excellent’, you can read reviews here.
Back in 2003 the new car market had hit a high with 2.58 million new vehicles sold and diesels were seeing a massive upturn with an increase of over 16% on the previous years diesel sales.
The were some familiar manufacturers topping new car sales back in 2003 with Ford selling the most cars closely followed by Vauxhall, other familiar top sellers were Renault, Peugeot, VW, Citroen, Toyota and Nissan with MG Rover sat at 9th in the new car sellers list.
Unfortunately, the writing was on the wall for the for MG Rover (formerly the Rover Group) as it had seen sales on the slide and in 2005 the company went into liquidation with an estimated 6000+ people losing their jobs.
One of the new kids on the block back in 2003 was KIA who saw a massive upturn in sales and began to cement its position in the UK car market.
Diesel sales continued to grow and be the ‘got to’ car for low running costs and although vehicles like the Toyota Hybrid were being mass -produced by 2000 you wouldn’t see that many on the roads for a few years yet.
Fast forward to 2017/2018 where we've seen ups and downs in the market, the landscape has changed significantly. Diesels have taken a hit in the last few years and we’re looking ahead to seeing more hybrid and electric vehicles on UK roads (although we’re behind some of our European counterparts in terms of infrastructure and support for plug-ins and full electric vehicles).
A complete ban on petrol and diesel vehicles is targeted by 2040 across Europe (although some quarters advocate it should be brought forward to 2030). Sometime before 2040 we should definitely see autonomous/driverless cars on UK roads, something which may have seemed more of sci-fi fantasy than reality back in 2003.
Autonomous vehicles are being pushed hard by the Government who want commercial production of driverless cars by 2021. The Department of Transport was quoted as saying: “We are working to make sure the UK remains one of the best places for self-driving vehicles, including updating our code of practice to support true self-driving trials.”
Car manufacturers are already packing their models with high-tech autonomous driving features (especially on higher grade trim-levels) like automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning and lane changing technology, traffic sign recognition, adaptive cruise control (sometimes called radar cruise control), pedestrian and collision detection systems and parking assistants.
What ever twists and turns the UK car market takes in the next 15 years, one thing is for sure; UK Car Discount will remain loyal to it’s core values and keep passing on big discounts to its customers with the same professional, friendly service.
You can start your search and compare a wide range of new car deals here.