UK new car inventory: latest trends among major brands

On 15 October 2026, 13 car manufacturers listed 62,948 new cars on their UK websites. These brands made 55% of UK registrations in the first half of the year, so their own stock is a good read on where cars are piling up and how hard each brand is pushing them.

• Battery-electric cars are 14.3% of listed stock, against the 33% of sales the ZEV mandate asks for in 2026. Only Volvo's stock is above that line.
• 0% finance splits brands inside the same group. Volkswagen quotes 0% APR on 53% of its finance-quoted stock, while Audi, Škoda and CUPRA quote it on none. BMW quotes it on none, while MINI quotes it on every car.
• CUPRA and Audi list more than six weeks of sales. Ford, MINI, Toyota, Vauxhall and Volvo list less than one week.

Electric stock is less than half the mandated level

The 2026 ZEV mandate requires 33% of each manufacturer's new UK car sales to be zero-emission. Of the cars listed on 15 October, 14.3% were battery-electric and another 7.7% were plug-in hybrids, which don't count toward the mandate. BMW has the highest plug-in hybrid share of any brand, at 18.2%, against 8.7% battery-electric.

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The mandate counts sales, not stock, and manufacturers can use credits and other flexibilities to meet it. A brand below the line is not necessarily missing its target. The stock mix does show how hard each one has to push its electric cars. To reach 33% of sales from what it holds today, every brand except Volvo needs its electric cars to sell faster than the rest of its stock: about 1.6 times as fast at CUPRA, and more than 30 times as fast at Toyota, whose listed stock is 1.5% battery-electric.

Finance incentives split within groups

The share of finance-quoted stock at 0% APR runs from all to none. MINI quotes 0% on every car. Audi, BMW, CUPRA and Škoda quote it on none. The split inside Volkswagen Group is the clearest case: 6,595 Volkswagens are advertised at 0% APR, and none of the 25,029 finance-quoted Audis, Škodas and CUPRAs are.

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Rates diverge within groups too. CUPRA and Volkswagen have almost the same median listed price, £40,610 and £40,330, yet their mean advertised APRs are 3.4 points apart, at 6.40% and 3.03%. Across all brands, price barely predicts the rate. Renault and Toyota publish no representative finance example, so both finance charts cover 11 of the 13 brands.

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Stock is concentrated in Volkswagen Group brands

Dividing each brand's listed stock by its average daily registrations in the first half of 2026 gives a rough measure of how many days of sales it holds on its own website.

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Across the panel the figure is 18.2 days. Audi's figure is skewed by pipeline stock: 7,152 of its 14,584 listed cars are not in the UK yet. 3,170 are due in four to six weeks, 2,526 in two to three weeks and 1,456 in eight weeks. On the cars available now, Audi holds 22.9 days of sales rather than 45.0.

The brands with the most stock relative to sales are not the ones offering cheap finance. CUPRA, Audi and BMW hold some of the highest stock levels and quote no 0% APR. MINI and Vauxhall hold five to six days each and quote the most.

The most-listed models

Twelve of the 15 most-listed models are Volkswagen Group cars, across Audi, Volkswagen, CUPRA and Škoda. Together those twelve are 37.5% of all listed stock. The exceptions are the Renault Clio in fifth and two BMWs, the X3 in seventh and the X1 in eleventh.

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What we'll track next

• Days on market by model and fuel type from 27 October, to see whether electric stock sells faster than the rest.
• Daily price and APR changes per car, to see which brands cut prices or add finance support as stock ages.
• Quarter-end pre-registrations at Mercedes-Benz in late December.
• Monthly sales inferred from stock changes, checked against SMMT registrations for October in early November.