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Welcome to our latest blog post, and this week we’re digging into what the most popular used cars on CarXpert have been during April. Now, CarXpert only launched mid-April, but people have been busy looking for the best used cars and rating cars, so we have plenty of data to work with.
A bit of background on how we’ve come up for the information for this article –
CarXpert lets people rate used cars based on their MOT history, and its those ratings that are the basis for this post. We’re not looking at anyone’s personal information, just the cars that have been rated.
Sometimes the same car gets rated more than once. As we’re not looking at personal information we can’t tell if it’s the same person rating the same car several times, or if it’s a number of different people getting ratings for the same car. To be on the safe side, we’ve assumed it’s the same person, so we’re only counting each car once irrespective of how many times it gets rated.
Incidentally, if you are someone that’s rated the same car several times, we’d be interested in hearing why you did that via the comments – it could be we need to add a feature to the site.
If you haven’t tried CarXpert’s used car rating system, you can try it here – just pop in the registration number of the car you want to rate.
So, what cars have people been getting ratings on?
The most popular car in April was the Ford Fiesta.
Here’s the full top 10:
1 Ford Fiesta
2 BMW 3 Series
3 Volkswagen Golf
4 Audi A3
5 Ford Focus
6 Vauxhall Corsa
7 Vauxhall Astra
8 BMW 1 Series
9 Mazda 3
10 Audi A4
That’s quite an interesting mix – the Fiesta has been the top selling supermini or thereabouts for a long time, but in second place we have BMW’s 3 Series- which is generally outsold new by the Corsa that’s in sixth place. Maybe suggests that the most popular used cars are different from the most popular new ones?
That’s definitely the case when we look at what type of fuel type or engine people are considering. The latest new car sales figures from the SMMT (the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders) show that in 2021 so far only 11.4% of cars are Diesel powered, and 7.5% are Electric.
When we look at the cars that people have been rating on CarXpert, Diesel made up 45% of the total, so it looks like for a lot of people looking for a used car the answer to the question “should I buy a diesel car?” the answer is “yes”.
Some electric cars were rated, but under half of one percent, so it looks like the market for used electric cars is still small – which makes sense given that it’s only recently that sales of new electric cars have taken off.
Here’s the breakdown of rated cars by fuel type –
1 Petrol 53%
2 Diesel 45%
3 Hybrid Electric (Clean) 2%
4 Electric 0%
5 Other 0%
6 Electric Diesel 0%
That difference in fuel type is very likely to do with the age of the cars that people are being rated. The average age of the cars rated in April was just over 12 years, and overall, the proportion of cars in different age groups breaks down as follows –
The low proportion of cars in the up to 5 years old category isn’t too much of a surprise given that cars don’t need to be MOT’d till they are 3 years old, and CarXpert’s ratings are based on MOT history. The biggest single category is cars in the 11 to 15 years old bracket, accounting for 34% of rated cars. This also explains why the average mileage of cars rated in April was nearly 91,000 miles.
As cars get older then, understandably, more tends to go wrong with them so we’re hoping that the average age of the cars rated in April means that visitors to our site have been getting valuable information about which of the cars they’ve been looking at have been getting the best (and worst!) MOT results.
We hope you found this brief summary of what we’ve been seeing on CarXpert over the last month interesting, and if there’s any other topics you’d like us to cover please let us know in the comments.