A test-drive request is one of the highest-intent moments in the automotive funnel: it is where online interest becomes a visit to the dealership. We audited the test-drive request form of every car brand actively sold in France, from mainstream and premium to luxury and the new Chinese entrants. Across the 45 forms that could be scored, the average is 5.5 out of 10.
The French test-drive form benchmark
All 45 brands scored on five categories, the design of every form and the behavioural benchmark for each field. The top of the ranking is open to everyone; leave your email address to read the rest.
See the full benchmark reportKey findings of the French test-drive form benchmark
- The average French test-drive form scores 5.5 out of 10. Cupra and Omoda & Jaecoo share the lead at 6.6; Škoda scores lowest at 4.1.
- Performance is the biggest shared weakness, with a category average of 4.3. Web standards follow at 4.6. Style is a French strength, averaging 6.5.
- Not one of the 45 scored forms auto-focuses the first field, and 40 of 45 run no captcha at all.
- 30 of 45 forms miss the correct email input type. Still, 15 French forms do use it, a far better rate than in the UK, where only one brand did.
- Only seven brands carry the model a visitor was looking at through to the form: Renault, Dacia, Alpine, MG, Ineos, Lotus and Polestar.
- Only ten of the 51 live forms let visitors pick a preferred date and time, about one in five.
- Around 16 brands require an explicit consent or attestation tick before submitting; the majority rely on implied consent.
Source: Exatom form-audit engine, July 2026.
Why test-drive forms matter for automotive lead generation
Car brands spend heavily on paid media to bring visitors to a test-drive page, yet engagement with the form itself stays low. Exatom’s automotive analytics show the pattern:
- Only 11% of visitors who land on a test-drive form start filling it in; 89% leave without touching it.
- Of those who start, an average of 47% reach the submit button.
- In the end, only 5% of visitors complete the form and become a lead.
Source: Exatom Automotive Industry Analytics, Q4 2024.
Forms with too many fields, confusing steps, slow pages or accessibility barriers create friction and make visitors abandon. Well-built forms remove that friction, so more qualified leads reach dealerships from the same traffic.
How French car brands score
Across the 45 brands that could be scored, the average overall audit score is 5.5 out of 10.
| Position | Brand | Overall score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cupra | 6.6 |
| 1 | Omoda & Jaecoo | 6.6 |
| 3 | Aston Martin | 6.5 |
| 3 | Seat | 6.5 |
| 5 | BMW, Honda, Land Rover | 6.4 |
| Bottom group | Polestar (4.5), BYD (4.3), Alpine and Xpeng (4.2) | |
| Last of 45 | Škoda | 4.1 |
The lead of Omoda & Jaecoo is remarkable for a brand that only entered the French market in 2025. The full ranking of all 45 brands, with the scores in every category, is in the benchmark report.
The French test-drive form benchmark
All 45 brands scored on five categories, the design of every form and the behavioural benchmark for each field. The top of the ranking is open to everyone; leave your email address to read the rest.
See the full benchmark reportNo consensus about the ideal test-drive form
As in the Netherlands and the UK, the French market shows no agreed standard. Brands split roughly 60/40 between single-step forms, which favour speed and simplicity, and multi-step journeys, which guide the visitor but risk abandonment when they run long. Dealer locators are near-universal but vary widely: postal-code lookups that silently route the lead, lists ranked by distance and interactive maps. The number of personal-data fields ranges from four to eight, with a median of five, a much tighter spread than in the UK. French forms also almost universally add a civilité (title) selector, a market convention largely absent in the UK.
Accessibility and performance remain weak spots for many brands, which matters given the European Accessibility Act. The strongest forms combine fast load times, clean field alignment, labels above inputs and correct HTML input types.
The French Stellantis FCA wizard (Fiat, Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Jeep and Lancia) asks for personal details before the dealer is chosen. That is the reverse of best practice, which starts with the low-effort choices.
Two structural findings
France’s two domestic groups sit at opposite ends
The Renault Group’s booking platform (Renault 6.2, Dacia 6.0) is among the strongest flows in the market, with real slot booking. Stellantis’ legacy-PSA forms (Peugeot 5.0, Citroën 4.9) and its FCA wizard (Fiat 5.1) rank in the bottom half, and Alpine (4.2) is nearly last.
The new Chinese entrants split sharply
Omoda & Jaecoo lead the entire market, while Xpeng, Zeekr, BYD and Leapmotor occupy four of the bottom eight places. The main cause: their visually modern, app-style forms ignore basic HTML standards such as proper form structure and labels.
The French test-drive form benchmark
All 45 brands scored on five categories, the design of every form and the behavioural benchmark for each field. The top of the ranking is open to everyone; leave your email address to read the rest.
See the full benchmark reportHow real visitors behave: the behavioural benchmark
The audit predicts friction from the code. Exatom’s behavioural benchmark shows what real visitors do. It is built from aggregated, anonymised analytics of live test-drive request forms of more than ten automotive brands in Europe, and shows where visitors start, autofill, hesitate, make errors and abandon.
- Completion is hard-won: even the strongest brand converts only 26% of the visitors it engages, and the median brand 7%.
- Errors are widespread: at the median, one in five interactions (21%) hits a validation error, and at the worst-performing brand 58% do.
- The consent or opt-in field is the biggest abandonment risk, with drop-off reaching 69% at the worst brand. That matters in France, where sixteen brands put a required tick before submission.
- Autofill is under-used: even on simple name and email fields, only 40 to 50% of visitors benefit at the median brand.
Source: Exatom Industry Benchmark, Q1 2026, Automotive, Mobility & Transportation, category “Test-drive request”, aggregated across more than ten European brands.
The French test-drive form benchmark
All 45 brands scored on five categories, the design of every form and the behavioural benchmark for each field. The top of the ranking is open to everyone; leave your email address to read the rest.
See the full benchmark reportHow we researched the benchmark
The analysis was carried out with the Exatom form-audit engine, which evaluates the HTML structure of a form. It does not take actual behaviour into account. Unlike the earlier Dutch and UK editions, which covered a fixed list of the largest brands, this French edition set out to cover every car brand actively sold in France. In total 63 brands were researched, on the desktop test-drive forms of each brand’s official French site, concentrating on the personal-information section. Data was collected in July 2026.
Of the 63 brands, 51 offer a live online test-drive request form in France, and 45 of those could be scored by the audit engine. Six could not be read automatically: Volkswagen, Smart, Bentley and Mitsubishi block third-party audit scripts, while Porsche (which only offers dealer-level forms) and Subaru defeat the engine through shadow-DOM structures or script blocking. Their design attributes were assessed by hand.
The French test-drive form benchmark
All 45 brands scored on five categories, the design of every form and the behavioural benchmark for each field. The top of the ranking is open to everyone; leave your email address to read the rest.
See the full benchmark reportA direct revenue opportunity
The best-performing brands succeed by focusing on speed, usability and standards compliance. Lower scorers tend to have outdated or inconsistent designs, or ultra-modern ones that skipped the basics. That leaves plenty of room: brands that simplify their forms, carry the chosen model through, fix performance and follow modern HTML practice will convert more visitors into dealership leads. Optimising a test-drive request form is not only a UX project; it is a direct revenue opportunity.
How Exatom helps automotive brands win more test-drive leads
The audit shows how a form is built. Exatom’s cookieless, GDPR-compliant platform shows how real prospects interact with every field: where they hesitate, re-type or abandon. Form analytics pinpoints the friction that costs conversions, and each fix is validated with built-in A/B testing. The result is more completed test-drive requests from the same traffic and ad spend. Kia Germany raised its test-drive form conversion by 55% this way.
The French test-drive form benchmark
All 45 brands scored on five categories, the design of every form and the behavioural benchmark for each field. The top of the ranking is open to everyone; leave your email address to read the rest.
See the full benchmark reportFrequently asked questions
What conversion rate can French car brands expect from a test-drive request form?
Only 11% of visitors who land on a test-drive form actually start filling it in, 47% of those reach the submit button, and just 5% convert into a completed lead. That means roughly 95 of every 100 visitors who arrive on the page never become a dealership lead, even before paid-media costs are considered.
Which car brand has the best-performing test-drive form in France?
Cupra and Omoda & Jaecoo share the lead in the 2026 French benchmark with an overall score of 6.6 out of 10, a remarkable result for Omoda & Jaecoo, which only entered the French market in 2025. Aston Martin and Seat (6.5) follow, ahead of BMW, Honda and Land Rover (6.4). At the other end of the ranking, Škoda scores lowest at 4.1, with Alpine and Xpeng (4.2), BYD (4.3) and Polestar (4.5) also in the bottom group.
Why do so many French test-drive forms perform poorly on page speed?
Performance is the weakest category across the French market, averaging just 4.3 out of 10, lower than accessibility, usability, style or web standards. Alpine's form scored only 0.7, while Alfa Romeo and MG reached just 1.3, and BMW, Mini, Peugeot and Suzuki lagged at 2.9. Even the fastest brands, Mercedes-Benz and Renault, only reached 6.5, showing that speed remains an unsolved problem industry-wide.
Why does no French test-drive form auto-focus the first field?
The audit found that none of the 45 scoreable French brands auto-focus the first field when the form loads, making it the single weakest check in the benchmark. It is a small fix, a single HTML attribute, yet every brand leaves it undone. Spam protection is almost as rare, with 40 of 45 forms running no captcha, and 30 of 45 miss the correct email input type. Encouragingly, 15 French forms do use it, including Cupra, Seat, Honda, Land Rover, Kia, Toyota and Lexus, a far better rate than in the UK, where only one brand did.
Where in a test-drive form do most visitors drop off?
The behavioural data points to the consent or opt-in field as the single biggest abandonment risk: the median brand loses 8% of visitors there, and the worst-performing brand loses 69%, the highest drop-off of any field measured. This matters particularly in France, where sixteen brands gate submission behind a required consent or attestation tick. Address fields cause the most re-typing, with correction rates as high as 58%, while postcode fields show error rates of up to 76%.
How do Chinese car brands perform in the French test-drive benchmark?
The new Chinese entrants split sharply. Omoda & Jaecoo lead the entire French market with 6.6, while Xpeng, Zeekr, BYD and Leapmotor occupy four of the bottom eight places. Their visually modern, app-style forms often lack proper form structure and labels: Xpeng (0.2), Leapmotor (0.3) and BYD (0.8) post three of the five weakest web-standards scores in the benchmark.
How was the French test-drive benchmark researched?
Exatom's form-audit engine analysed the desktop test-drive forms of every car brand actively sold in France in July 2026, scoring the personal-information section of each on its underlying HTML rather than live user behaviour. Of 63 brands researched, 51 offer a live online test-drive form and 45 were scored. Volkswagen, Smart, Bentley and Mitsubishi block third-party audit scripts, while Porsche and Subaru defeat the engine through shadow-DOM structures or script blocking; their design attributes were assessed manually.
