One in Three new car registrations not real, says CAP

CAP, the car valuation experts, reckons every third new car is actually being pre-registered by a dealer rather than being sold to a genuine customer.

That is the highest figure ever claimed, but CAP says it knows of one dealer group offered £500,000 to put more discounted cars on the road this summer, another manufacturer subsidising discounts of up to 40% in return for self-registering cars and a dealer group who reported an increase in new cars registered which masked an underlying 6% fall in actual new car sales. CAP also identified 80,000 tactical registrations by just 2 dealers in July.