This Car Company Has The Best Website

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 17, 9:04AM EDT

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This Car Company Has The Best Website — © juanelo242a / Flickr

The car company website used to be a place for consumers to find pictures, dimensions, features, and prices of brand models. Eventually, people could “build” cars online. This meant they could add features to base models to get the prices of these. Unfortunately, dealers might have different prices. The auto website was imperfect, but the age of the internet, and then broadband, made it a necessary means to market cars.

The value of the car website to buyers began to change as well. People could order cars online. And the COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in online buying. Dealers were shuttered, sometimes for months. Pent-up demand drove car sales to recorded levels this year. For many car shoppers, car company websites became a major shopping toll.

Widely regarded car research firm J.D. Power twice a year releases its “U.S. Manufacturer Website Evaluation Study”. The new one’s release period is for the summer. The study looks at how useful these websites are in the shopping process. J.D. Power points out that online shopping has indeed risen. Jon Sundberg, director of digital solutions at J.D. Power, pointed out “This year’s study puts more emphasis on auto shopping tools that give consumers the information they need to make online purchase decisions, allowing us to stay on top of these emerging trends and communicate them to auto manufacturers.” The first version of this study was released in 1999.

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The new research is based on several metrics–“information/content; visual appeal; navigation; and speed.” These yardsticks are really not much different from those used to evaluate any consumer website. The sample base covers 11,443 new-vehicle shoppers, who say that will be in the market to buy a car in the next two years. This wave of the study was gathered in April and May

J.D. Power’s maximum score for the “U.S. Manufacturer Website Evaluation Study” is 1000. Even the highest-rated sites fall short of that. The measures are broken into two segments. The first is for “premium” cars. The average for these brands is 714 out of 1,000. For mass-market cars, the average is 710.

The premium car with the best website score was Acura, the luxury division of Honda, with a score of 747, just ahead of BMW at 732. Among mass-market brands the winner was Buick

The auto websites are likely to become even more critical to manufacturers over time. J.D.Power points out that forty-nine percent of shoppers currently buy a car online. That is up eleven percentage points from 18 months a year ago.

Click here to read This Is The Best Selling Car In America

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.