If you live in the United Kingdom or want to move here, you’ve most likely already thought about getting your own vehicle – using public transportation may be good enough, but when you need to get somewhere fast or you have to carry a lot of luggage, it can be really hard if not downright impossible without your own car.
Even if you’re not living in the UK and aren’t planning to move here anytime soon, you can still benefit a lot from the local vehicles market – the cars and trucks here are the cheapest in the European Union – there are plenty of people who buy a car here and even choose to leave the registration in the country, as well, driving them in their own home country.
Motors.co.uk – the UK’s number one online vehicles marketplace
Obviously, it would be hard to find a car or any other vehicle if you had to use local newspaper ads – fortunately, with the Internet, everything became a lot easier. You can easily search among tens of thousands of current ads online, and the premier marketplace in the UK is Motors.co.uk – if you want to buy a new or used car, this is the first place you should check out.
The website is great for searching for cars and contacting the sellers, but if you’re already on the move and don’t have the time or place to open up a laptop, there’s a great alternative – a mobile app for both the iPhone/iPad and Android devices. All you need is a SIM card and you can search for cars and calling/messaging the sellers right away.
The iPhone/iPad app
The Motors.co.uk app for the iPhone and iPad looks nice and does pretty much everything you might expect from it: it lets you easily search for cars, see the posted ads and photos, as well as the seller’s contact information. The user interface differs between the iPhone and iPad, which is a good thing in this case – the bigger display on the iPad makes it easier to view the photos and all the information provided by the seller.
The app is fairly simple to use. You can navigate easily across three tabs namely Search, Shortlist, and Info. Once launched you will instantly be taken to the “Search” tab where you can search for new and old cars alike based on 17 preferences: Make, Model, Postcode, Distance, Body Style, Minimum Price, Maximum Price, Color, Fuel Type, Minimum Age, Maximum Age, Minimum Mileage, Maximum Mileage, Transmission, CO2 Emissions, Annual Road Tax, and Fuel Efficiency. There’s even the additional option to place a Keyword for narrowing down searches further. With the exception of Keyword and Postcode – which require you to manually input text by the way – all other options are automated. Simply tap on the small box or arrow down button beside a criterion and make a selection from the box that appears.
As of today, there are more than 50 car makers, hundreds of models, 8 body styles, and more than a dozen colours to choose from. Utility, luxury, and sports car makers all have their shares of cars on sale. Even though the app lacks a GPS feature for auto-detection of location, you can easily find cars near your area by typing in the full postcode of your area. Users can look for cars within 20 to 200 miles from the specified postcode or even search on a national scale.
After filling up the criteria, you can hit the Search button on top and related matches will appear under the same tab. Since they include images, you can quickly spot the cars you like based on appearance alone. Results are shown in batches of 20 which make for a smooth browsing. The same results can be sorted based on price, distance from the set postcode, and mileage which means that you can look for a car that hits your budget or is convenient for you.
Find a car you like? Select one from the Search Results to view more details concerning the car. Exact pricing and other specific details are viewable at this point. If you are using an iOS or Android device with a SIM card, you can give the car dealer a call – that is, if a contact number is included. In this case, a Call button will appear on the lower right. If you wish to communicate through other modes of communication, you can request for a seller’s details by selecting “Request Sellers Details” on the lower left or choose the “Options” icon on the centre when applicable. From the Cars’ view, you can return to the Search Results by pressing the button on the upper left. Android users are at a benefit here since they can use their device’s Back button for navigation.
The best feature of the Motors.co.uk Car Search is that you can create a shortlist of cars you’re most interested in. While viewing a car’s details, simply select the “Add To Shortlist” option on the upper right corner. Cars can be removed from the shortlist by pressing the same button which will then appear as “Remove From Shortlist”. You can navigate quickly to your shortlist by selecting the appropriate tab on the bottom.
The Android app
Motors.co.uk also has an Android app, which does pretty much what the iPhone app does, too. The interface is not as sleek and clean, but it gets the job done faster and with way less bandwidth used than the web site – using it is better than firing up the Web browser and navigating through the site. The functionality of the Android app is the same as on the iPhone: you search for the car specs you need and scroll through the photos and information – sadly, there are no quick contact buttons or the ability to save your searches, which is an oversight, in my opinion. Nonetheless, the app gets the job done. The tablet version has the same UI and functionality, just oversized.
Verdict
Motors.co.uk Car Search is a simple but brilliant app for anyone who’s looking to buy a car within United Kingdom. It is most useful for prospect buyers as well as dealers who want to compete. The option to search for cars by up to 200 miles from your postal code is a priceless feature which any local resident would appreciate. Preferences can be narrowed down to the finest details based on two essentials – your taste for cars and personal needs. Since the app is free, I say it’s worth looking over. So long as you input your complete postcode, it won’t disappoint. Buying a car in the UK has never been easier and is literally within your grasp.
