Who is the new car buyer?
Earlier this year we unveiled the results of the Auto Trader New Car Awards 2021 as voted for by 148,000 car owners. As well as telling us what they thought of their cars, owners made it clear that they still loved their new cars. We’ve seen this love of new cars reflected on our platform as lockdown restrictions start to ease, with May 2021 seeing a record number of leads, up 218.9% compared to May 2020, being sent to retailers across the UK.
So, with many car buyers now on the hunt for their next new car we reveal who exactly is the new car buyer.
Revealing the identity of the new car buyer
In general, we see that new car buyers are older and wealthier than the average used car buyer. Perhaps this is no surprise, but our latest insights do reveal where the highest concentration of new car buyers are located. As we can see in the heatmap the highest concentrations are in the midlands and the north west, with cities in these regions being a particular hot point for new car buyers.
The adage that electric vehicles (EV) are pricing regular car buyers out of an EV does seem to ring true when we look at the average demographic of these buyers. The average new EV buyer is much more affluent, being twice as likely to be in a £75k+ household income bracket.
What are they looking for?
For starters, the new car buyer is not someone who is not set on what their next car is to be, with new car buyers considering on average 10.8 brands when deciding on their next new car.
Of these 10.8 brands we can see the top 3 most viewed new car brands on our marketplace are the “big three” German brands, BMW, Audi & Mercedes-Benz. However, with volume brands having a higher market penetration, this is in part down to aspirational searches and we have seen that the fastest growing brands in terms of new car advert views on our platform, it is Mini that comes out on top with followed by Skoda and just missing out on the top three if MG.
New car buyers interact the most with adverts that have over 25 real-life images of the vehicle, with such adverts seeing an average of 8.9 views per day on our platform compared to just two views for an advert with up to five images on the advert.
Despite growth in electric vehicle sales, new car buyers are still primarily focussed on internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles with 91% of our new car audience looking at petrol cars and 79% at diesel. The volume of new car buyers looking at alternative fuel vehicles is growing though with 36% looking at petrol plug-in hybrids and 29% looking at electric cars.
Where is the crossover?
Whilst we tend to label consumers as premium or volume brand buyers, it is important to note that there is significant crossover between the two with 91.8% of buyers consider a premium brand and 83.7% considering a volume brand. Clearly then there is a good amount of crossover
This is also true when it comes to new and used buyers with 61% of buyers who looked at a vehicle up to one year old also looked at a new car and, whilst this percentage drops as the age range increases, 45% of buyers looking at a one to three year old car also looked at a new car.
On a brand level, we can see where the competition lies for each brand and crucially to whom they are losing audience to. Below is our new car brand universe where we can see the audience crossover on our platform.
The above represents the overall new car audience universe and we have condensed these into segments e.g. new EV audience universe, new SUV audience universe etc. Get in touch with us to learn more.