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Elizabeth Clements, who bought a Range Rover through Carsite recently wrote in her feedback about her buying experience that she “found the whole experience significantly less stressful than buying from a dealer”…Providing us with her answer to Salesroom vs. Online.

New statistics have revealed that women may not be so clueless when it comes to car buying, but in fact may be manipulating their situation to their own advantage. Research carried out for eBay motors says that a quarter of British women have lied about how much money they’ve got to spend on a car, one in ten have played dumb so that the salesmen will take pity on them and 10% will flirt if it helps them get a better deal. Some also admit to deliberately leaving their partner at home which eschews the idea that women need a man in order to get a better price on a car.

However, the fact is that women are only able to secure a good deal on a car because they appear to be foolish, or because the salesman may have the hots for them. This shows a striking lack of knowledge on the part of the female buyers. They should not feel intimidated when they try to talk to the salesmen on their own terms. Women car buyers should not feel that they need to resort to flirting when buying a car but should arrive armed with the knowledge to do some serious bargaining. That is what we hope you will do after your visit to GalsCarGuide!

The eBay motors survey also shows that 52% of women don’t know what MPG stands for and 65% are in the dark about the essential V5 document. At GalsCarGuide we were so shocked at these statistics that we immediately put the facts on their site. To find out the truth about V5 and MPG visit the ‘Find the Right Car’ section.

Another finding of the survey was that a quarter of women would prefer to buy a used car from a women than from a man and 40% think female private sellers are more honest and will tell buyers about any small fault in the car. But, why make buying a car such a gender specific hassle?! If you choose to buy a car online from a site such as carsite.co.uk or eBay then this will be eliminated. Similarly, at carsite there is a 100% as described guarantee.

With almost half (48%) of women not getting a final say on what car they drive you could infer that feminism has a long way to go. Or, perhaps, more correctly, you may realise that car dealers simply aren’t very good at inspiring trust in their customers. A greater proportion of men (46%) than women (42%) admit to feeling patronised by car dealers. Maybe we should all be car shopping online.

A new survey from IPC magazines and Citroen reports that up to 14% of women now wish to buy a fast sports car. This shows a sharp increase in recent years. Due to these changing consumer desires, advertisements for sports cars, such as Ferraris, can now be seen in Vogue as well as Autocar.

Similarly, GalsCarGuide has been featured in Company magazine’s list of ‘rules to live your life by’. Company, which is aimed at young, trendya dn streetwise women, stated that getting a new car, one more suited to you, is a crucial factor to consider when ‘making over’ your life.

So, are cars the new handbags? Are women simply becoming more interested in technology and gadgets? Or have they always been, and simply haven’t had it acknowledged till now?

However, while the media and advertising industry are quick to respond to the changing needs of modern women, it seems that car dealers have not follwed suit. Despite the findings of the IPC and Citroen survey - which shows an increase in women’s desire for faster, more expensive cars - the survey also reports that they are stil not being taken seriously on the forecourt..

Despite 93% of women over 35 owning their own car, three out of five felt that car dealers did not take them seriously. These three in five women felt that car dealers assumed they only wanted to drive ‘runarounds’ when as many as 14% actually wanted a sports car or open-topped coupe.

It appears that dealers have failed to keep up with the rest of the world and change up a gear since the 1996 Which? Magazine survey which found that three out of five female researchers felt that some salemen were reluctant to deal with women.

But is it the motoring industry as a whole which is still stuck in the dark ages? Or is the problem restricted to dealers and their showrooms? Seeing as websites devoted singularly to car buying, such as GalsCarGuide, are being featured in magazines such as Company and Ferraris are gracing the pages of Vogue, I would venture a guess that the answer lies with the latter rather than the former.

Motorists will flock to showrooms tomorrow for the release of the first new number plate of 2007, eager to get their hands on the latest stock. However, its value will plummet by up to ££7,000 as soon as they drive it off the forecourt. A car could be worth up to 44 per cent less than it had been just minutes earlier if the driver wanted to re-sell it.

A recent consumer test involving 20 of the biggest selling models in the UK discovered a huge gap between the fore court price and the car’s value just a few miles down the road.

The motoring magazine Auto Express rang dealers in three parts of the country for each of the 20 models, claiming to be an owner who had made a terrible mistake. The “owners” said they had bought the car less than a week earlier and had only driven a few miles in it, but due to a “change in circumstance” needed to sell it again and wanted to see what they could get for it. The results shocked the researchers. The biggest price gap - £6,985 - was on a BMW 3 series, which costs just under £25,000 new but which dealers would buy back for only £18,000. The biggest proportional loss was on a Ford Ka, whose slump in value from £7,395 to only £4,167 in a matter of days represented a 44 per cent drop. The car which held its value the most, in percentage terms, was the £10,750 Honda Jazz, which fell in value by 15 per cent to £9,100 after a few days - still a £1,650 loss for an owner.
Researchers based their figures on the original list price of the car and an average of the three quotes from dealers to buy it back when it was a week old with 50 miles on the clock. In the course of their investigations, the researchers discovered many of the 60 franchised dealers they rang had experienced dozens of similar cases themselves.

Jeff Patterson, of the car-price “bible” Glass’s Guide, said: “The simple fact is manufacturers produce more units than they can ever sell. These cars have to go somewhere when they leave the factory gates, and the only option is to pre-register some of them. Technically, they are no longer new, but the fact they only have delivery miles on the clock and are very cheap pushes down the value of every other used car.”

Mat Watson, the features editor of Auto Express, said: “Hundreds of thousands of people will be visiting their car dealer tomorrow to buy a brand new 07-plated vehicle, unaware of the huge sums of money they will lose the moment they drive it off the forecourt.”

The day of the number plate change is the biggest day of the year for new car sales to private buyers. But why are consumers so attracted to buying a brand new car when it involves them losing so much money? They could save thousands if they were to wait just a few months and buy the same car, practically new, at a massively reduced price? This is why gals car guide recommends carsite - they stock high quality cars at lower prices.

Women purchase more than 50% of new cars, and up to 62% in some brands. They influence over 80% of car purchases in America and by 2010 they are expected to control more than 60% wealth in the country. If this is the case why is it so often assumed that women need a man’s help when it comes to choosing and buying a car?! Armed with the facts from places such as gals car guide anyone should be able to feel comfortable about purchasing a car. After all, knowledge is power!

So, do women need men’s help when it comes to buying a car? Have your say now.

Suzanne Bedfourd recently interviewed thefounder of galscarguide on Southern Counties Radio. Suzanne, whose airtime centred on the question ‘do women really need men when it comes to buying cars?’, admitted that her boyfriend had found her past four cars for her.

Surveys suggest that, like Suzanne, many women still take their boyfriends or husbands with them to car dealerships.

Why is this?

Is it because they think they need a man, or are they just lazy and apathetic when it comes to the details of car buying? Are women putting their men under unnecessary pressure to be a car expert and simply burdening them with what should be their own responsibility? Why should somebody be a car expert just because they are a man, and is it true that women are merely disinterested in cars? Is it wrong to make such generalisations when it comes to gender? Can cars be specifically marketed to women without perpetuating gender stereotypes? Women complain about the automotive industry being male dominated…but is that the way we really want it?!

What do you think?

And whilst you’re thinking…is Jeremy Clarkson an irritating chauvinist or secretly quite entertaining?