It’s clear from delving into the Carzone.ie search data that buying and search habits have stabilised over the past year with very little obvious deviation in search patterns. Saying that, there has been an increase in overall searches on the site, revealing that more people are considering buying a car as the country obviously moves further away from recession. This is supported by Cartell.ie’s transaction data, revealing that a massive million used car transactions (1,048,541) were carried out in 2014 for the first time.
Within the site search data we discover that the most searched for car on Carzone.ie is the Volkswagen Golf, as it has been since it overtook the BMW 3 Series back in 2013. At the start of last year we witnessed the larger 5 Series also moving up the popularity charts above its 3 Series relation and that trend remained until the end of 2014 and into the first quarter of 2015.
But below the top three there appear to be changes afoot for 2015 - if the data from the first few months is anything to go by. The Ford Focus displaces the Audi A4 from fourth spot, while the Audi A6 is demoted from sixth in 2014 to eighth in 2015. That’s partly due to an increase in the number of searches for the Volkswagen Passat (moving it up a place to sixth and likely to be due to the arrival into Ireland of an all-new model at the start of the year), but more significant is the jump in popularity of the Nissan Qashqai, moving from 10th spot at the end of 2014 to an impressive seventh position. Notably, the Qashqai is also the third best-selling new car up to the end of March.
Other changes in the top 20 include a three-place jump for the Ford Mondeo to 10th (again probably sparked by the arrival of an all-new model in the showrooms) and a four-place jump to 12th spot for the Skoda Octavia. Curiously, the BMW X5 managed to sneak into 20th place for the last six months of 2014, but it’s back down in 30th place now again and the only full-sized SUV in the top 20 is the evergreen Hyundai Santa Fe. Saying that, the Land Rover Discovery makes an appearance in 21st place, followed by Kia’s Sportage - which seems to be gaining popularity with age.
We’ve not seen a change in the top six searched-for car brands in a while, and while all was stable at the end of 2014, Volkswagen overtook BMW for top spot in the first quarter of the year, with over two million specific searches for Volkswagen cars. BMW was in second followed by Audi, Ford, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz. Hyundai overtook Opel for eighth place, while Skoda, Honda, Renault, Mitsubishi and Lexus all gained in popularity.