Used Car Industry News and Resources

It appears that the UK car manufacturing industry is looking up. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) have released statistics showing that car output is up 15.1% over the last year. In July itself, there was a 22.2% rise which is the 13th consecutive month with an improvement. More detailed figures show that despite the overall improvement in car output some areas are stil...

For the first time in it's 50 years of business, the JLR plant at Halewood in Merseyside has introduced a night shift into their working schedules, and as such staff are now working 24 hours a day; a venture which was first announced in March this year. The reason for this extending of working hours is to help meet current global demand for the Range Rover Evoque, the Compact SUV, which has...

This September, just a few weeks away, the first batch of new cars bearing the 62 plate will be arriving at dealers and garages throughout the UK, in what is likely to turn into one of the busiest periods of this year so far for the automotive industry. During the month of September alone, the SMMT are expecting car buyers to be shelling out around 4.95 billion pounds on something in the re...

Last month in July, for the second time this year the number of new van registrations has risen, and increased by more than 10 percent to 18,913 registrations. This comes after a decrease in sales of 2.2 percent in June. This increase has help to stabilise the year's rolling sales figures for light commercial vehicles, which are down a mere 0.1 percent from 2011, with 248,452 new van regist...

A report from the Automobile Association (AA) has highlighted a number of problems with petrol pumps and the counters they use, and has questioned the accuracy of their measurements. As a result of members voicing their concerns to the organisation, and complaints to trading standards, the AA conducted tests on a number of fuel pumps across the country. However from their tests, instead of...

Compared with July last year, vehicle sales have risen by 9.3% to 143,884, which has been the car industry's leading sales performance so far this year, and the fifth sequential monthly upturn. Total car sales so far this year are up by 3.5% to 1.2 million vehicles. This rise is thought to be because of the intensification of private car sales, rising by 26.4% over this year so far. The ...

According to a survey by Saga Motor Insurance, during the last 5 years the amount of people aged over 50 that carry out regular basic maintenance on their car has pretty much fallen by 50%. A poll by the company some five years ago showed that about 17% of older vehicle owners would try their hand at basic repairs and maintenance work on their car. The results of their latest survey are tha...

The Japanese car giant Honda has reported an earning increase of 400% for the first quarter of this year, as the firm works on it's recovery from the natural disasters that plagued Japan and Thailand last year. Honda's vehicle sales in Japan and the US also doubled during the April to June period, with net profit rising to 131.7 billion yen (£1.1 billion), an increase from 31.7 billion yen (...

Japanese car manufacturer Nissan and French manufacturer Renault both report a fall in net profit for the first half of the year. A 15% fall in the case of Nissan with a net income of 72.3 billion yen (£577 million), though Renault more than doubled this percentage, with a 39% fall, and a net income of 786 million euros (£615 million). However, German company Volkswagen have broken the...

In a recent survey by industry experts What Car? and Warranty Direct of second hand vehicles between three years and a decade old, Japanese car manufacturers Toyota, Honda, Suzuki, Subaru and Lexus have been revealed as the most reliable used cars available on the UK market. The South Korean car manufacturer Hyundai was ranked in sixth place, alongside Japanese Mitsubishi and Mazda, with a...