Beyond sales and finance, car ownership and purchase preferences have been noted across the board by online car retailers.

As the clamour of the September licence plate change disperses, online retailers have been among those busied by dissecting its statistics.

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The Volkswagen Golf has been the used car model viewed most often by potential customers using the AA Cars website since it launched in July.

The Mercedes C Class was second and the Land Rover Range Rover Sport third. The VW brand had two other models in the top 20 with the Transporter van (14th) and Passat (17th). However, Land Rover was the most-represented in the top 20 with four models, including the Discovery (5th), the Defender (16th) and Range Rover (20th).

Gumtree, the private sales website, is offering dealers the option to bulk-load their inventories to the site using the Motors Pro dealer portal run by parent website eBay. Dealers will be able to promote finance deals within the text of each advert. Gumtree claimed in excess of four million ads listed in 2012 and currently records approximately two million unique visitors to its motor pages each month.

The website has also provided a comparative snapshot of car ownership attitudes between global motorists and those in the UK, based on 10,054 interviews with drivers, 1,008 in the UK, conducted by research company Redshift.

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Meanwhile, car sevicing comparison website tootcompare.com posted the Toyota IQ as the model most likely to pass an MOT test (91.82% of 2,835 tests between 1 January and 9 August 2013), just nudging out the Honda Jazz and Honda CR-V. Lexus was the marque most reliable to pass an MOT (89.48% of 3,784 tests), ahead of Subaru, then Honda.

richard.brown@timetric.com