When the time comes to buy a car, kicking the tyres online - rather than trailing round used car lots and dealer showrooms - can save an awful lot of time. I should know, having tried it both ways.
Had the internet not been around to make life easier, I'd be pedalling off on my holidays on a bicycle. I didn't go the whole hog and buy the car over the web: most of us decide this item's ticket is a little large to casually One-Click order it in an ad break. This is rather more than buying a book, after all. But doing your research online makes great sense.
A few months ago, with a deadline to replace our existing wheels looming, my wife and I elected to start visiting dealerships, testing the lie of the land. It was a waste of time: the local Ford salesmen would sooner amputate an arm than give you a catalogue without a lengthy sales pitch and questionnaire, while a Renault garage, rather lacking in the advertised va-va-voom, had no sales literature at all. Taking to the web, goes the theory, should allow you to compare features - and prices - and make a decision in the calm of your living room, without bad coffee, cheesy sales pitches and all that driving between showrooms.
In the US, always the leader in such things, two-thirds of new car buyers go online to research their purchase, according to a recent JD Power survey. Alas, even then, things don't quite work that way. Car-makers' sites are, too often, perfect examples of the very worst in over-fussy, hard-to-use web design: the Ford site is so bogged down in flashy bits it fails to work in some browsers, while others hid the vital (price) information away, if it was there at all.
Instead of gazing at the slow-loading online brochures of the car makers, it makes much more sense to visit an independent site. A favourite is Whatcar.com, a neatly designed, plain-speaking place that has lots of car reviews and enough statistics to keep even the biggest anorak rustling contentedly. Happily, it loads quickly enough to encourage browsing: you do not have to know exactly which car you want before visiting.
The same cannot be said of the Topgear site at beeb.com, which used to be worth a look. The Trabant-paced loading times of its pages make browsing its content a chore. Carpricecheck also offers a speedy way to check on prices for both new and used cars in your area. In fact, with its clean interface and apparently large database, it would be an excellent resource - if it wasn't for one thing.
The most useful content, like the location of a car you're interested in, or the garage offering the great deal, only arrives after you have handed over your contact details. For many surfers - especially the casual ones, or those of us fearful of the car trade's hard-sell tactics - that might be too much of a barrier, especially as there is no privacy policy visible on the site. In the end, frustrated by the official dealerships and scared off by the high new prices, we decided on a used car.
To start our hunt, we turned to AutoTrader (the Guardian Media Group owns part of Trader Media Group). Here, it really does help to know what kind of car you are after. Luckily, we did: a dispiriting trawl round a vast used car warehouse in South Wales was brightened only by the discovery of a rather tatty Fiat Coupe. Despite the condition, we fell for the looks: now all we had to do was find an example in better condition. With AutoTrader, you tell it what you're after and enter your postcode. It returns the full details of cars that fit your description within a given radius, along with a map from Multimap.
However, it does appear to slow to an unusable crawl at certain times of the week. Details entered, we set off on a tour of garages in our neighbouring counties. We armed ourselves with a little knowledge of what to look out for, supplied by Honest John of the Daily Telegraph, and the pricing bible Parkers, which also has useful reviews of popular used cars.
Parkers even has a PocketPC version you can download to your handheld for £6. So, with all this internet-generated knowledge in our hands, did we get what we were after? Yes - straight away, as it happened, although we did not realise it at the time. The first car we saw was the one we eventually plumped for, but fear of this used car game had us visiting the others in our price range before returning to say yes. The transaction was concluded at a small, off- the-beaten track garage in deepest Oxfordshire a week later. Without the internet, we would never have been able to find our new car: the net as matchmaker had struck again.
