It’s a family thing. The Peter Cooper Group was founded 45 years ago, in 1981, with Peter Cooper opening his first car showroom in Hedge End, Southampton.
Today Motor Trader is with his son Darren Cooper, who took on the role of managing director in 2006. Then, the group comprised three Volkswagen franchises, a body repair centre, and approximately 165 staff.
Today, it operates from Shirley, West End and Hedge End in Southampton, Portsmouth, Chichester and Horsham, with 23 businesses and 300 staff. It now represents Volkswagen, Kia, Jaecoo, Omoda, Xpeng and Jeep and has a leasing business and EV charging subsidiary.
In the UK, dealers are facing a sluggish economy and abroad there is uncertainty with war in Iran and closer to home Ukraine. So, how is Darren Cooper finding the market and buyer sentiment. Tough? Demanding? Overall, it is a story of ongoing challenges – for all dealers – sourcing used cars but relief that the new car market is proving so resilient.
“I think we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the buoyancy of the Q1 market. When you look at all the potential disruption and uncertainty globally, we were concerned that this year was going to be increasingly difficult.
“We had our best ever March and Q1 performance. An awful lot of work had gone into making sure that we had strong offers with regards to our VIP events. And those all responded well. The consumer confidence was there, despite all the disruptions globally.”
According to Cooper the performance was across the board although there are supply issues with Xpeng.
“Xpeng is probably one of our more niche brands that we’ve got now. The product is very strong, but supply is inconsistent. But we did end up having a reasonable number that were delivered in March, which made a difference.
“We launched with Xpeng in mid-2025. It’s probably a more premium product, hence its higher price. We look at it as a Chinese Tesla, technology-based, great product with good build quality. The only issue that we have had is lack of supply, which has been frustrating at times.”
Peter Cooper is a long time Volkswagen dealer and was unaffected by the restructuring the OEM carried out into its network.
“We have had a long-standing and strong relationship with Volkswagen for 45 years now. And we’ve already got contiguous territory, which runs from Lymington across to the other side of Chichester,” said Cooper.
Peter Cooper, like so many dealer groups, ran the rule over a number of Chinese brands in early to mid-2024 that were targeting the UK.
“Omoda and Jaecoo were one of the options that we were researching, along with BYD as well. However, Omoda and Jaecoo had a stronger offer for the general consumer than BYD did have to start with. BYD was predominantly electric and Omoda and Jaecoo had the strength of having ICE and BEV variations.
“BYD has been in the UK market for a few years now, whereas obviously Omoda and Jaecoo only entered in January last year. I think they’ve taken about a year to do 50,000 units in the UK. I think it was something like 14 years for Kia to achieve 50,000-unit sales in the UK. So, they’ve had incredible growth in an incredibly short period of time.
“They’ve managed to establish their dealer network very quickly. And the product has backed that up as well. The warranty is strong, so, it gives consumers confidence relatively quickly. The pricing and the specification is strong, and the supply has been positive. We’ve been able to respond to market demand well. Whereas sometimes the supply chain doesn’t quite meet up with the consumer demand curve and sometimes we have a lot of orders, but we just can’t get them out the doors quick enough,” he said.
I asked Cooper, was he dealing with management from China or with the UK representatives?
“To start with, it was just executives from China. And they then they very quickly established a UK based team. I probably have a hybrid of the two, because obviously I’m talking as an investor whereas some of our line managers will deal mainly with a UK based field team.”
While Chinese brands are now an important part of any dealer group’s arsenal, Cooper highlights the importance of the Volkswagen brand to the business. In the past the group did have Audi and has looked at Skoda locally, but it did not happen.
“Volkswagen is close to our hearts and a massive part of our business. I grew up with the Volkswagen Group brands in our family and business life. Our alignment to their values is absolute. They’ve proved a fantastic franchise for us to have over that 45-year period. We’re fortunate to have a good, strong business relationship with them.”
The dealer group came relatively late to the Kia brand, which is a serial award-winner in the Motor Trader Awards as the franchise of choice for dealers in terms of profitability and business issues.
“The Kia brand came into our group in 2023. We’d been wanting to join Kia for some time. And I’d have to say, you know, the last three years have been really, positive. We’ve relocated it into a bigger facility. We’ve invested heavily in the site and the team structure and I’ve been absolutely delighted with Kia’s performance overall from a passenger car perspective, performing well in the Southampton territory,” he said.
Recently Cooper announced that it had been chosen to take on Kia’s electric van range. “When Kia vans came along, it was a natural decision for us to represent it.”
For Cooper, the line-up has moved the goalpost when it comes to range, in sharp contrast to older vans where range was a negative issue.
“EV vans have had a bit of a question mark over them, mainly because of the lack of range. But with Kia their range is getting up to the mid-200s, which, as we saw in cars, is the changing point,” he said.
“I think when it does come through to the second-hand market, it’ll have much more demand because of the range that it can achieve. Historically used vans, maybe two years old, might only have a 100 to 120-mile range, which just isn’t that effective for most businesses,” he said.
I ask Cooper is he looking around for acquisitions or to take on other brands.
“I don’t have a particular target to aim for with regards to our expansion strategy for the future. It’s not a certain number of sites or a set turnover that we’re trying to achieve. It’s much more around any opportunities that we think fit our business model strategically and we think will complement what we’ve already got. Any opportunities within the brands that we’ve already got, whether that’s Chery, Volkswagen or Kia through passenger cars or vans, then, you know, we would be pleased to take forward any opportunities that we can find,” he said.
Cooper also points out that he now looks further afield than in the past in terms of opening new business. A two-hour drive is now feasible. “We’ve probably started to widen our sphere of influence as well.”
I ask Cooper about motor finance and his take on the current FCA motor finance redress scheme.
“We’ve always been strict around our controls of any sort of processes regarding finance and FCA generally. The motor finance commission cases now are creating a fair amount of inquiries.
“I would say the biggest pain that we have now to deal with and put resource towards, is fielding customer inquiries, requesting previous information or documentation that we would have gone through with them at point of sale. It’s mainly from a time and resource perspective rather than generating business for the bottom line.”
I asked Cooper did have any records of motor finance commission going back to 2007, which is stipulated by one of the two schemes?
“No, we don’t. We would probably stay within the seven-year file storage rulings that we that we need from an accounting perspective. From a GDPR perspective, there are lots of controls and processes around what data we keep and how long for. We don’t keep anything longer than necessary to minimise any risks associated to those sorts of areas.
Peter Cooper, like all dealers must cope with the shortage of supplies of used cars caused by low new car sales during the pandemic.
“The sourcing of used cars has been an ongoing challenge for the last few years, really, ever since COVID, with the shrinkage that we’ve seen in the used car market.
“Overall, we’ve seen a buoyant start to 2026 with regards to the used car market. We’ve got quite a strong team within the used group. I’ve got two buyers that work with all the managers across each of the sites to stock the forecourts that we’ve got. And we retain a large number of the part-exchanges that we bring in.”
One area of the business that has been negatively impacted is its bodyshop which shut in January after 40 years in business.
“We decided to close our paint and body repair centre in Bognor in January because it wasn’t a freehold site. The rent reviews that came up were a significant percentage increase on what we were paying before. That along with the fact that I just don’t think the money that we’ve been receiving from insurance jobs has increased in line with the overall costs of the business. It just hasn’t kept up to speed. We found that that facility was difficult to generate an operating margin in it.
“We were forced to make the decision to close that. We have retained all the smart repair facilities that we had. We’ve invested in smaller ovens at our key sites that will retain all the smart repair, alloy wheel and small repairs really sort of due that would be small body shop repairs that are slightly bigger than normal smart work.
Peter Cooper also has a revenue stream in servicing all makes cars with its Bosch Service Centres. These are set to grow in the future.
“We have those purely to try and capture the customer journey once they naturally at some point fall out of the franchise servicing regime and lose them to the independent market.
“ I think when you look at the used car sales that we do outside of the franchise network, which is generating an awful lot of customers locally, this will end up generating service throughputs for those businesses. I would see over the next sort of five years us having another two or three independent service outlets across our geographical area.
Peter Cooper also has an electrical business. “My Trusted Electrical is a full electrical contracting business. I started Electrical Vehicle Charge Point Installations (My EVCP) at the beginning of COVID. But that very quickly grew to not just doing EV charging point installations for our customers, but for also local businesses, local hotels, local golf clubs, that sort of thing.
“And then when we were working with them, they had overall electrical requirement needs out-side of the EV charging points. My Trusted Electrical was formed a few years ago and effectively does cater for all electrical needs from certification and remedial works to LED conversions for large scale buildings, showrooms, factories.”
It is evident that Peter Cooper is a strong business with close local links to the commmunity and positive values. It represent strong brands like Kia and Volkswagen and growing Chinese marques. It also benefits from an additional revenue stream generated by its electrical business. For Darren Cooper the position is clear.
“We’ve got a strong culture across the business because we wanted to make sure that as we did go through an expansion strategy, we didn’t lose what made our business special to all its employees.
“We have anniversary lunches for everyone that joined a particular business in that given month with directors attending. I guess really the expansion has been driven by a local business that’s always had great feedback from its customers on the customer experience.”
