Easy to find a nice new car. Or an old banger. They are all here! (autotrader.co.uk)

Member Name: DarkestGrey

Product:	autotrader.co.uk
Date:	03/09/08 (43 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Wide range of garages. Local searching. Flexible searching.

Disadvantages: Not every car listed. Pop-up adverts. Sold cars can remain on for a while.

Autotrader is an nice and easy way of looking for a new or used car.

SEARCHING
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You can enter the details you require, you don't have to know the exact make and model - you can search all the listings within 10 miles for cars between £1000 and £2000 for example.

If there are many cars from many sellers listed, it can also help to see if you they are asking a fair price.

ADVERTS
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The site is full of adverts and the one that really annoys me is the constant Alliance & Leicester pop-up and the autotrader pop-up asking you to complete a survey about their site. If you close these, they tend to pop back up, so it is better to use the minimise button on the title bar instead.

Alliance & Leicester have advertised their loans so heavily on there I have almost mentally linked them to cars. It also makes me look elsewhere if I needed a loan - they now appear too pushy.

SEARCH DETAILS
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You can search within a certain radius of your postcode or do a national search if you are looking for something rare. There are price range searching but this suffers by being a drop down list. If your budget is £2500, the list only contains £2000 or £3000.

Search options include Diesel/Petrol/LPG and Manual/Auto gearbox. One nice touch is that you can search for private sellers only or trade sellers only (or both if you want). This really helps you to filter out the cars you are not interested in.

Also, they have recently opened their site up so you can do a full search (previously you had to register). This means you can now search for details on a car. Enter 'Air con' in the extra box or 'climate' and only cars with this listed in the description will appear in the search. This can be really useful at saving you some time.

USING THE SITE
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Apart from the irritating adverts, there are one or two issues. Sometimes a box appears asking if you want to compare used cars. This covers over half of the first listing in the search results.

Every time you change a detail, the page loads in. So you decide to change the search to limit between £1000 and £2000. You select £1000 as the minimum price, the page reloads and tells you how many results there will be (but doesn't show them). Then you select £2000 and the same thing happens again. Then you have to press show results. A little fiddly.

Many cars do have pictures provided by the owner or the garage and some have multiple pictures. It is nice to have inside and outside shots, but this is a little out of Autotraders control. Many are starting to use internal shots as well - which is always useful.

They do have a movie button. But be warned - this 'movie' is just moving around the photos with horrid music. Try it. It's worth it for a laugh. Once.

FINDING A CAR
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One of the bigger issues I have with the site is actually finding the location of a car. For a private sale, they give you a phone number, which is fair enough.

For a trade sale, they give you an estimated distance and the company name and a phone number. This is ok if the car dealer has only one location, but one in my area has about 4 locations and I can never work out where the car actually is.

OVERALL
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There are niggles, but for when looking for cars, this is my site of choice. They have a very wide range of garages listed and are quite easy to find what you want, even if it is a bit fiddly at times.

Summary: Very good site, with just some minor niggles.