The news that Graham’s Auto Centre on Byres Road in Glasgow is closing after nearly six decades caught attention this week. It’s a sad story for the Richardson family. But for anyone watching the UK independent aftermarket closely, it’s also a familiar one — and the forces behind it are worth understanding properly.
The market is getting harder for everyone — but unevenly so
Factor Sales data shows the UK automotive aftermarket fell 4.3% in value and 3.2% in units across the full year 2025. The decline was broad-based — most major catalogues contracted to some degree, and the anticipated H2 rebound did not materialise. Value fell 4.5% in the second half alone.
The categories under greatest pressure tell their own story. Transmission fell 9.2% in value. Body & Exhaust dropped 7.7%. Brakes — the bread and butter of most independent factors — were down 7.0%. Only Cooling & Heating posted any value growth, at a marginal +0.4%, and Service Parts were effectively flat at -0.4%.
Meanwhile, 72% of UK motorists are actively seeking cheaper maintenance options, rising to 92% among 17–44 year olds. Parts prices have risen 35% over four years, outstripping general UK inflation by 13 percentage points. The result is a customer base that is shopping harder, delaying non-essential work, and increasingly sensitive to who offers the best deal.
A shrinking overall market is survivable if your cost base is lean and your proposition is strong. The problem for smaller independents is that both of those conditions are increasingly difficult to meet when you’re up against operations that have invested heavily in distribution infrastructure, pricing capability, and technology.
It’s not just e-commerce. It’s economics.
The easy narrative is that online retail has disrupted the traditional factor model. That’s part of it. But the more significant pressure is coming from within the trade itself. Larger motor factor networks have structural cost advantages that a single-branch independent simply cannot match. They buy in volume, negotiate harder on trade prices, and can deploy delivery capacity across a wider geography and still make the economics work.
For garages — themselves under margin pressure and with increasingly easy access to price comparison — the calculus is straightforward: whoever offers the best combination of price, range, and speed of delivery wins the order. For a small independent factor trying to compete on all three simultaneously, that’s a very difficult position to hold.
Buying groups like A1MS exist precisely to help independents level that playing field through collective purchasing power. But pooled buying alone can only go so far when the gap in operational scale and delivery capability is this wide.
Government policy is compounding the pressure
Business rates remain a serious structural burden for any trade business anchored to physical premises. Infrastructure decisions — road redesigns, reduced parking, changes to vehicle access — compound the problem for businesses that depend on the trade pulling up outside. These decisions are rarely made with motor factors in mind, but the effect lands there regardless.
What the data tells us
One of the quieter consequences of independent factors closing is the loss of market intelligence. A business that’s been trading for decades carries embedded knowledge about its patch — which parts move, which garages turn work quickly, what the realistic price points are locally. That knowledge doesn’t transfer anywhere when the shutters come down.
The divergence between value and unit performance in our 2025 data is a good example of why that intelligence matters. Engine Parts saw unit growth of 1.5% for the full year despite a value decline of 1.8% — a gap that points to pricing pressure and evolving purchasing patterns that only show up when you’re looking at the right numbers. Stocking decisions made on instinct alone would miss that entirely.
When anonymised sell-out data is aggregated across a broad enough network, patterns like these emerge clearly — which categories are under pressure in which regions, where pricing has drifted from market norms, where demand is building ahead of what the supply side has noticed. The factors and suppliers navigating this period well are making decisions on stock, pricing, and customer mix based on exactly this kind of picture.
The consolidation will continue
The pressures driving smaller factors out are structural, not cyclical. Our data shows a market that softened broadly through 2025 and didn’t recover as expected. Business rates, infrastructure change, price competition from larger and better-capitalised operations, and a more cost-conscious customer base are all here to stay. Some independents will find ways to compete — through specialisation, service depth, or local relationships that larger networks can’t easily replicate. But the direction of travel is clear, and close monitoring of workshop demand, consumer confidence, and factor stocking strategies will remain critical as the market moves through 2026.