Despite the car market recovery, signalled today by the SMMT, French car manufacturers recorded lower than average car sales growth than the rest of the market.
UK car buyers seem to be losing their taste for French built cars - particularly Renault and Peugeot. The WeLoveAnyCar.com survey of 58,088 car owner ratings found French manufactured cars rated lowest in their country based results.
The ratings are made by combining scores on economy, reliability, comfort, driving experience and if the driver would recommend the car they own to others.
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As the ratings were an ‘average,’ further analysis shows that the French manufacturers score poorly on two main factors; reliability and that Renault, Citroën and Peugeot cars lacked excitement overall. The highest on the list – purely driven by Skoda – is the Czech Republic.
Fiat and Alfa Romeo comprise the Italian entrant. The Fiat 500 is rated extremely highly and is only brought down by other, less appreciated, models. Owners loved their Alfa Romeos but reliability is the poorest of any manufacturer. Fiat have one of the highest sales growth figures, nearly 20%, whilst Alfa Romeo sales dropped 26% in the results published today.
Some manufacturers are hard to pin down to a country or origin. Global manufacturing, international partnerships and joint agreements make it difficult to measure. Ford and Vauxhall could be judged as ‘Euro’ cars as they are produced in many countries.
Cars manufacturered in the UK are also hard to categorise; the score reflects traditional brands like Land Rover, Jaguar and Aston Martin. Also many cars are manufactured in the UK but may be listed as Japanese. In fact 1 in 7 of all new cars sold in the UK are also manufactured there.
A spokesman for WeLoveAnyCar.com said, “In truth, car buyers must choose the car that’s right for them and use car review sites like ours to gather information. The key factor is volume of reviews. For example, we have over six thousand Fords of every variant on our Car Review site and buyers can see how motorists rated their own particular model”.
58,088 Car Reviews were submitted by verified owners of cars in the last 12 months in the survey results. Excluded from the above are manufacturers with less than 50 entries to ensure the results were robust. The WeLoveAnyCar.com Car Review site, which is free to use, now holds over 62,206 reviews and this climbs daily as owners submit their reviews by invitation. The review database is representative of the UK car parc.
A final comment by the site spokesman was, "There are very few bad cars. The French manufacturers rated 3.92 out of 5 whereas Czech cars (all Skodas) were rated 4.23/5 so there's not much between them when looking at the averages. The devil is in the detail and that's why the site is such an aid to users who need to gather information for their next car choice".
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