How we create the best news and advice

With more than 50 years’ experience in helping people choose the best cars, What Car? is your trusted source for motoring news and advice. Our advice is focussed on helping car owners keep costs down and have the smoothest ownership experience, and our news brings you vital information on all the most important motoring-related topics.   

Our advice covers a wide range of areas, including tips on getting the best deal on a new car, new and used car reliability, True MPG and Real Range for electric cars. 

What makes What Car? news different? 

Rather than bombard readers with stories about all sorts of motoring news, we focus on the stories that are important to you, such as how low emission zones may affect you and the safest cars on sale. 

Using highly trusted information from our Target Price experts, we also provide details of the best deals on all types of cars, including SUVs and EVs. 

And when we know an issue needs to be addressed, we’ll campaign on your behalf to get things changed. 

Why can you trust What Car?’s advice? 

Our team has decades of experience in providing expert consumer advice on a wide range of topics. We offer legal advice on what to do if your car goes wrong, and undertake in-depth research projects to ensure the advice we give is highly trusted. 

Our annual What Car? Reliability Survey is based on information provided by more than 20,000 car owners, covering hundreds of new and used cars. The extensive data helps to paint a picture of what a car really like to live with over many years and thousands of miles.

We’re also the authority on real-world running costs, thanks to the extensive laboratory tests we undertake to report realistic fuel economy figures for petrol and diesel cars and the achievable ranges of EVs. 

How the What Car? Reliability Survey can help you

Whether you’re looking for a new SUV or a secondhand sports car, the What Car? Reliability Survey can help you make an informed choice. That’s because we’ve crunched the data on hundreds of car models to create a unique reliability rating for each one that reflects how much it cost owners to fix faults and how much time it spent in the garage. 

To ensure we provide information on as many cars as possible, we’ve separated the data into two age groups: cars aged up to five years old and cars aged from six to 20 years old. So you’ll be able to find the most dependable model whether you’re after a new model or a cheap and cheerful second family car. 

What is True MPG?

We know the fuel economy figures supplied by car makers aren’t always achievable in real-world driving, so we conduct our own testing, in a lab, under strictly controlled conditions, to reveal the True MPG for each new model on sale. 

Our data will give you a realistic figure for the economy you should be able to get from a car if you drive it gently and keep within speed limits. You don’t have to resort to any complicated ‘hypermiling’ driving techniques to achieve our fuel economy figures. 

What is Real Range?

Range anxiety is one of the biggest concerns of car buyers who are thinking of switching to a pure electric car. And, like official fuel economy figures, car makers’ range estimates can be difficult to achieve on the road. Electric cars can also be adversely affected by cold weather and if you use power-hungry systems such as the air-conditioning. 

However, you can rely on our Real Range figures for EVs to tell you the range you’ll actually get. Our tests are conducted in the strictly controlled environment of a test track to ensure each model goes through the same rigorous process, and that’s why you can trust our Real Range figures. 

EV buying and owning advice you can trust

We’re also experts when it comes to all things EV. We’ve tested the UK’s network of public EV charging stations so we can tell you which are the best – and which are best avoided. 

If you’re thinking of getting a home charger installed, we can tell you the companies that provide the best service and most affordable prices. 

And if you’re thinking of buying a secondhand EV, we can help too, with our guide to picking the best car for you. 

What else can What Car? help with? 

At What Car?, we aim to cover all aspects of car buying and ownership. So we have tips on the different forms of car finance, car security and how to get the best price if you’re selling your car. 

We’ve also looked at the future of driving and car buying, with informative guides on what it’s like to drive a ‘driverless car’, and the changes that are underway in car sales, due to the introduction of the agency sales method. 

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