Our Data Sources

Why this page exists

Most car finance comparison sites don't tell you where their data comes from. They show you deals and expect you to trust the numbers. We think you should know exactly what you're looking at, where it was sourced, when it was last checked, and where the gaps are.

Deal data: Carwow

Our PCP deal listings come from Carwow, the UK's largest new car comparison platform. We scrape their publicly available representative examples — the same figures they show to any visitor on their website.

The Carwow ceiling

A full crawl of all 458 Carwow deal pages confirmed that Carwow only publishes PCP representative examples for 16 makes: Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Citroen, Dacia, Fiat, Genesis, Hyundai, Jeep, Lexus, Mazda, Nissan, Peugeot, Polestar, Renault, Toyota, and Volvo.

The other 40 makes — including BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Ford, Kia, and Tesla — return pages with no "Representative example" text at all. This isn't a scraping failure or a JavaScript rendering issue. The data simply isn't there. We verified this by inspecting the raw server-rendered HTML (417KB+ per page) with no client-side data loading.

113 deals is our hard ceiling from Carwow. To cover the remaining makes, we need alternate data sources — see "What we don't have" below.

Interest rate benchmark: Bank of England

We use the Bank of England's Interactive Analytical Database (IADB) series IUMBV48 as our benchmark rate throughout the site. This is the average interest rate on a £10,000 unsecured personal loan from UK banks and building societies. It's updated monthly. When we say "the bank benchmark is 4.1%", this is where that number comes from.

This benchmark matters because a personal loan is the main alternative to dealer finance. If you can get a bank loan at 4.1%, any car finance deal above that rate costs you more for the same money. The gap between 4.1% and a lender's APR is the real price of convenience or credit accessibility.

Lender APR landscape

We scrape representative APRs directly from lender websites. This gives us the rates that lenders are legally required to publish — the rate that at least 51% of approved applicants will receive. We also collect rate ranges where published.

Sources include individual lender websites (Moneybarn, Carmoola, CarFinance247, Zuto, etc.) and the BestLoanRates directory for personal loan comparison rates. Each lender's data carries a timestamp of when it was last verified.

How the pipeline works

Our data pipeline is deliberately simple:

1. Python scrapers run manually on a local machine. No automated scheduling, no cron jobs.
2. Each scraper writes to a JSON file in our data/ directory with a _meta block containing the source URL, scrape timestamp, and any relevant parameters.
3. At build time, our static site generator (Astro) imports these JSON files directly. There's no database, no API layer, no runtime data fetching.
4. The built HTML is deployed to Cloudflare Pages. What you see is what was in the JSON files when we last built the site.

This means our data is always a snapshot. It's accurate as of the last scrape, not real-time. We state the scrape date wherever data is displayed so you can judge its freshness for yourself.

What we don't have

Transparency means being honest about gaps. Here's what we can't currently show you:

• Premium makes on Carwow. BMW, Audi, Mercedes, VW, Ford, Kia, Tesla, and 33 other makes have no representative examples on Carwow. We're working on scraping their captive finance sites directly (e.g., bmw.co.uk/finance).
• HP deals. Carwow only publishes PCP representative examples. Our HP data comes from individual lender websites, not from a centralised source.
• Real-time rates. Our data is snapshot-based. Rates change. Always verify the current rate on the lender's website before making a decision.
• Approval rates. We know lenders' representative APRs but not what percentage of applicants are actually approved, or what rate the bottom quartile receives.
• Commission data. We know the FCA banned DCAs in 2021, but we can't tell you the exact commission structure for any specific dealer-lender arrangement.

Suggesting a source

If you know of a publicly available data source for UK car finance rates that we're not using, we'd like to hear about it. We're particularly interested in manufacturer finance arms (captive finance), dealer aggregator APIs, and any FCA-published datasets on motor finance outcomes.