We are warned that diesel cars are doomed to a fast death, yet a new car selling index has named a surprise winner at the top of its inaugural Fastest Selling Index.

According to Auto Trader, the 2016 Seat Alhambra Diesel Automatic is the fastest selling used car in the current market, with an average of just 24 days to sell.

The new Index is powered by Auto Trader’s Retail Rating metric which analyses market supply and consumer demand to determine the fastest selling cars based on the number of days the car is likely to sell.

Of the top ten cars in Auto Trader’s ratings, six are diesel, two are electric and just two are petrol, which suggests that maybe diesel isn’t dead after all.

However, diesel also features prominently on the slowest selling car list, with seven of the slowest selling used cars featuring that fuel option with the 2019 Nissan Micra Diesel Manual taking 150 days to sell on average.

Commenting on the results, Auto Trader’s director of commercial products, Karolina Edwards-Smajda, said: “Whether influenced by supply, consumer demand or a host of other macro-economic factors, the retail market is in constant flux. As a result, we wanted to evolve our previous fastest selling analysis away from a retrospective view of the market, to an immediate one – rather than revealing what was desirable last month, we want to identify what’s selling fastest today. Because of the unrivalled scale of our data, we can arm retailers with the most accurate view of the live retail market to help them locate the most profitable opportunities for their forecourts.”

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