Erin Baker: Would you buy a car online?

This isn’t a rhetorical question: I’d really like to know whether people would, so leave a comment at the end of this article. Manufacturers and industry sites are split in their opinion of consumer behaviour. The public themselves are divided. There are two certainties, however: the first is that a car purchase, whether on finance or outright, is a weightier investment than most other products bought online, and therefore requires a greater degree of trust in the product, which is hard to gauge online. The second certainty is that most dealership experiences are still dreadful for the customer. Of course, there are exceptions, but in the main, dealerships remain old-fashioned, sexist and unappealing in their approach to customer relations. Lots of women, I know through conversations with them, would happily forgo a test drive and do the whole thing online.

I spoke to Paul Philpott, President of Kia UK, and Jeremy Hicks, MD of Jaguar Land Rover, at the Geneva motor show at the beginning of March. Both men were certain that motorists will always want to go to a dealership to complete the transaction. That a car is simply too expensive a purchase not to experience the product in real life before signing on the dotted line. We all agree that the days of multiple dealership visits to choose a car are over because customers do far more research before they visit to select their car, but nonetheless, these industry chiefs don’t envisage a day when the dealership ceases to exist.

I’m not so sure. Car sites like Auto Trader, Carwow, What Car? and more are inching towards that landscape. Perhaps they will go that way without or without the support of the brands, simply by tying in with dealers. If the public wants to go that route, the public will find a way to do it. Perhaps it will end up along the lines of other industries, like bidroom.com in the hotel industry, where it isn’t the buyer trying to haggle for the best purchase price, but the seller bidding for the customer business. The customer would simply put in his or her budget and the make, model and colour of car they are looking for, with perhaps mileage as one of the negotiables, and the site will alert up to five dealers who have cars nearly matching your spec, for them to bid against one another for your business. Perhaps there’s a site that already does that.

Or maybe there will be an almighty backlash against the internet of things and we’ll all revert to an analogue structure of going to look at, feel, smell, touch and drive cars. Doesn’t that sound revolutionary?