8:00 am, December 12, 2025
The days of a 10 million-strong UK car market are all set to return next year.
Speaking to Car Dealer Live, Auto Trader’s chief commercial officer, Ian Plummer, said that according the company’s metrics the motor industry will reach a major milestone in 2026 as supply, demand and consumer confidence continue to stabilise.
‘We’ll be getting back to where we were in 2019 in terms of the size of the overall market,’ he told Car Dealer in the video posted at the top of this story. ‘It will have taken the best part of six years to get back to around 10 million new and used cars transacted in a year.’
Plummer admitted that the process of getting back to pre-covid levels of sales has been ‘slow’, and shouldn’t be mistaken for rapid expansion.
‘It isn’t as if we’re leaping forwards,’ he said. ‘You could apply adjectives like “modest growth”, “relative stability” and “steady performance” to this year and next. New cars are trending around 4% up this year, used cars around 2%, and we expect very similar next year.’
Despite the overall recovery, Plummer said new car volumes remain lower than before the pandemic due to ‘aggressive’ price increases.
‘New cars are around 50% more expensive now than they were pre-pandemic,’ he explained. ‘Some people are priced out. Legislation, inflation and the shift to EVs have all pushed costs up, and when you increase prices that much, you reduce demand.’
Used car availability also poses challenges, particularly in the three-to-five-year-old age bracket.
‘You can’t transact something that doesn’t exist,’ he said. ‘The five-year park is fundamentally smaller. That won’t ever change — it’s baked into the system.’
Plummer also revealed the three big themes car dealers have to be aware of in 2026. Watch the video to see what they are.
