If you’re looking to buy a new car (or near-new car), then car reviews are a great way to help you understand which car might be right for you. But there are literally tens of thousands of car reviews – just from UK sources – on the internet. So which reviews should you trust?
Every website will tell you that their reviews are the best in the business but, at the end of the day, they all have their good and bad points.
Each review will be one website’s (well, usually one person’s) opinion of that car. Some motoring journalists drive lots of cars each year, and have been doing so for decades. Others might review a few cars here and there along with various other roles.
Each website will have its own methods for reviewing cars, as well as its own way of measuring and scoring cars. Some sites update their reviews on a regular basis to account for changes to each model and the overall marketplace, while others don’t. And most websites don’t review every car available, or they use a number of different journalists to review different cars, so it all gets a bit hit-and-miss very quickly.
We built a better solution
The Car Expert has been bringing real-world, practical advice to car buyers and car owners for more than a decade. There’s no car industry spin and no favouritism; just honest, independent and impartial consumer advice on every aspect of buying, financing, owning and selling your car.
Now, we’ve asked our expert guidance to not just how to buy a car, but which car to buy. Our unique Expert Rating Index is the new gold standard for ranking new cars for consumers.
Pieces of a puzzle
All those thousands of car reviews on the internet and in car magazines are like individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. To really work out what the best car in your price range is, you need to put all the pieces of that puzzle together. So if you’re only relying on one or two sources, you’re not getting the full picture.
To help you do that, The Car Expert has created our Expert Rating Index.
We compile and analyze new car reviews from 30 of the UK’s leading automotive websites. As of July 2022, we have indexed more than 13,000 new car reviews and we’ve published comprehensive Expert Ratings on more than 400 new cars – including all the biggest-selling cars in every price bracket.
Rather than reading one or two reviews of a couple of different cars in your price range, you can see every review published from the 30 sources we monitor at a single glance.
We pull together dozens of reviews for every car on the market and use an advanced algorithm to analyze all those reviews, compare different scoring systems and adjust for the age of each review. It’s a complex process, but all of this effort produces a definitive score for each car.
Bringing science and data to your car buying choices
Think of our Expert Rating Index as “the Rotten Tomatoes of new car reviews”. By aggregating dozens of reviews for each car, you get a consensus of expert opinion, not just one journalist’s thoughts.
The Expert Rating Index brings a level of sophistication never before seen in ranking the best and worst new cars in the UK. It’s the most accurate and reliable method ever developed to rate and rank every new car on sale.
We’re bringing science and data analysis to the subjective and old-fashioned world of reviewing new cars, using established aggregating principles in a similar fashion to sites like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic.
As well as media reviews, we also show you complete safety ratings from Euro NC (not just the headline score) and eco data from Green NC. Where plicable, we also have security ratings from Thatcham Research and reliability data from MotorEasy. And we’re currently working on bringing even more data to help build an even better overall picture for each car.
If you like what you see for a particular car, we can then link you straight to some of the top sales sites in the UK, like Cazoo, car wow other Motors.co.uk so that you can check out prices.
If you’d like a lease quote, we have links to all the latest deals on offer from industry-leading leasing providers like Carparison, Hippo LeasingMoneyshake and more.
If you’re interested in the ridly-growing world of car subscriptions, we have partnerships with industry leaders Mycardirect, Elmo other Wagonex.
In other words, we give you the most reliable information on every new car, then put you in touch with the best people to help you put one on your driveway.
The Car Expert’s aggregated ratings technology is already generating excitement within the car industry. Leasing.com, one of the UK’s top car leasing websites, is now using a custom algorithm and bespoke integration from The Car Expert to power its new car rating scores. More sites will be adding this functionality in coming months.
No spin, no favourite. Just the answers you need
Check out our latest analysis of the following new car sectors:
… with more categories coming soon.
So if you really want to know whether Car A is better or worse than Car B, we have the definitive answer. Whatever sort of car you’re looking for, you can use our Expert Ratings to help you choose.
This article was originally written in October 2021. Last updated July 2022.
