AUTODOC Vehicle Parts

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AUTODOC lists a brake pad set for a Ford Fiesta — the commonest car in Britain — from £18.49, and brings it to your door for £8.45, or £1.90 once the basket passes £130. Both figures are AUTODOC's own, taken from its catalogue and its shipping table on 2 October 2026.

Behind that price is one of the largest parts operations in Europe. AUTODOC was founded in Berlin in 2008 and now runs online shops in 27 European countries with more than 5,500 staff across 13 of them. Its 2025 results report revenue of €1.8 billion, up from €1.6 billion the year before, on 18.9 million orders from 9.3 million active customers, with 72.5 million individual items shipped. The catalogue grew 16.2% last year to 7.8 million part numbers from 2,700 manufacturers, covering 176 car brands, 154 motorcycle brands and 23 truck brands. You buy from Autodoc SE, the Berlin company itself, rather than from a UK reseller.

The part of the business a home mechanic will use most is free and sits outside the shop. AUTODOC Club publishes 3,711 video tutorials and 21,840 step-by-step PDF manuals, written by its own technicians and open to anyone who registers. If you have never changed a wishbone before, the instructions for your exact model are there before you have spent anything.

What £18.49 buys, and what it costs to get here

Prices at the cheap end of the catalogue are low enough that delivery becomes the bigger number. A brake pad set for a Ford Fiesta starts at £18.49 for the BREMBO set carrying article number P 24 044, one of roughly two dozen sets listed for that model from BREMBO, BOSCH, ATE, TEXTAR, TRW, FERODO, JURID, DELPHI, VALEO, METELLI and febi bilstein. Across the whole catalogue, brake pads run from £10.99 to £173.99 an axle set and come from 143 different manufacturers.

Shipping to Great Britain is £8.45 on an order below £130.00 and drops to £1.90 at or above it; tyres ship for £1.99. On a single set of £18.49 pads that first figure adds 46% to the bill, which is the arithmetic that makes AUTODOC a place to do a whole job rather than buy one small item — pads, discs, sensors and fluid together clear £130 easily and travel for £1.90. Every price shown includes 20% VAT, so nothing lands with a customs charge attached.

Items held in stock are "sent within 1–2 working days after the receipt of payment", carried by DPD and Evri, with no weekend or bank holiday deliveries. Two caveats sit in the same table: the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey each carry a £15.00 surcharge, and bulky items are not offered to Great Britain at all — a bonnet or a bumper can be shipped to a dozen European countries for between £16.96 and £119.85, and not to a UK address.

A catalogue built for a 9.7-year-old car

The size of the range is the product. SMMT's Motorparc report of 24 April 2026 counted 36,676,185 cars on British roads out of a record 42,549,649 vehicles, with the average car now 9.7 years old. The single most common model is the Ford Fiesta at almost 1.4 million units, 3.7% of the whole car parc, and most of those are long out of warranty and past the age at which a franchised dealer is the obvious place to go. A catalogue of 7.8 million part numbers exists because a nine-year-old car needs parts a main dealer may no longer stock.

AUTODOC also makes its own. Its own-brand range — RIDEX at the budget end and goCORE in remanufactured units — grew 19.7% last year to more than 94,000 items, and own-brand stock is how a parts retailer protects a margin when it is selling BOSCH at the same price as everyone else. For a buyer the practical consequence is choice of price band on the same shelf: the identical job can be done with a RIDEX part, an aftermarket brand or an OE-matching one, and the listing shows all three side by side.

One structural point to register before ordering. AUTODOC runs a marketplace as well as its own shop, and the terms draw a hard line between them. Goods "marked 'sold by AUTODOC'" are sold by Autodoc SE; for everything else the terms say the third-party seller "is responsible to Customers for complying with its obligations" and that "AUTODOC is not a party to the Purchase Agreement" (Section C, 1.2). The label on the listing decides who owes you a refund.

The 15% rule that decides whether a cheap brake pad is legal

A £10.99 brake pad set invites an obvious question, and there is a precise answer to it. Replacement friction material for ordinary cars and light vans — categories M1, M2 and N1 up to 3.5 tonnes — has to be approved under UN ECE Regulation No. 90. The test is comparative rather than absolute: an approved replacement pad may not deviate from the friction performance of the original part by more than 15% in either direction. Approval shows on the part and the packaging as a circled E with the approving country's number, followed by an approval number in the format 90R-, and R90 also requires the sealed, tamper-evident box the pads arrive in.

Credit where it is due: AUTODOC's own brake pads category page sets all of this out, naming the regulation, the vehicle categories and the 90R- marking format, which is more than most sellers bother to explain. It is the single most useful thing on the page for anyone nervous about buying brakes online, because it converts “is this safe” into “what is printed on the box”. What we could not establish is whether an individual product listing publishes its own approval number before you buy, as opposed to explaining the system in general — that needs confirming against a specific listing, and until it is, the box in your hands is the thing to check.

The same reasoning extends past brakes. Lighting, glass, catalytic converters, seat belts and tyres all carry their own approval marks, and a part without one is not a bargain — it is a part that can fail an MOT or an insurer's question after a claim. Buying on price alone is fine as long as price is not the only thing being compared.

Fitting your own parts does not void anything, and there is a law that says so

The worry that stops people buying parts themselves is the dealer's raised eyebrow at the next service. UK competition law settled that argument. The Competition Act 1998 (Motor Vehicle Agreements Block Exemption) Order 2023 — SI 2023/501, made on 28 April 2023, in force from 1 June 2023 and running until 31 May 2029 — keeps the aftermarket open after the EU regime stopped applying. It defines a spare part as "a component of a motor vehicle which is, or is intended to be, installed in or on a motor vehicle to replace an original part, and includes software", which is broad enough to include the control unit as well as the bracket.

Two provisions matter to a home mechanic. Article 5(2)(a) makes it a hardcore restriction to restrict sales of aftermarket goods to independent repairers who want to use them for repair and maintenance — so a manufacturer cannot lawfully close the supply line that AUTODOC sits on. Article 6 stops a supplier withholding technical information, tools or training from independent operators in a way that disadvantages them against authorised repairers, which is the clause that keeps repair data flowing to the garage round the corner.

What the Order does not do is rewrite your manufacturer warranty. A warranty can still require servicing to schedule and parts of matching quality, and if a part you fitted causes the failure, that failure is on you. The practical rule is unchanged and undramatic: keep the receipt, keep the box with the approval mark on it, and use parts of equivalent specification. Nothing in the Order obliges a manufacturer to honour a claim caused by a part that was not up to the job.

Berlin, a £100 London company, and the name on your receipt

The corporate picture is worth two minutes before you order, because the terms and the company page do not say what a UK shopper might assume. The seller is Autodoc SE at Friedrichstraße 111, 10117 Berlin, registered at the District Court of Berlin (Charlottenburg) under HRB 247677 B, VAT number DE260634589, with Dmitri Zadorojnij as chief executive and Lennart Schmidt as chief financial officer. The terms are explicit that for goods sold directly, "the contracting party for the sale of goods on the AUTODOC Marketplace, which are marked 'sold by AUTODOC', is Autodoc SE" (Section B, 1.1).

There is a British company, and it is newer and smaller than the website implies. AUTODOC OPERATIONS UK LIMITED, company number 16336466, was incorporated on 24 March 2025 with £100 of share capital, registered at Suite 1, 7th Floor, 50 Broadway, London SW1H 0DB, trading under SIC codes 45310 and 45320 for wholesale and retail of motor vehicle parts. It shortened its first accounting period to 31 December 2025 on the day it was formed and filed small-company accounts for that period on 12 July 2026. It is a real company doing real work — and it is not the entity your purchase agreement names.

That distinction decides small practical things. Prices include UK VAT at 20% and goods arrive without an import charge, so day to day the arrangement is invisible. It becomes visible the moment something goes wrong, because the address on the return label and the counterparty on the contract are both in Germany. AUTODOC's own terms concede the point a UK consumer needs: for consumers, the mandatory provisions of their country of residence apply, and Section B, 9.1 states that consumer customers benefit from statutory protections "including that goods sold are of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose" — the language of the Consumer Rights Act 2015. Berlin jurisdiction is reserved for merchants and business buyers, not for you.

Sending a part back is where the money goes

This is the weakest part of the proposition, and it is weak in a way that bites hardest on exactly the cheap single part the pricing invites you to buy. The standard window is the statutory 14 days, with the goods to be returned no later than 14 days after you give notice. Postage is yours: "for returns exercised under the statutory right of withdrawal, the Customer shall bear all direct return shipping costs". The return address is AUTODOC SE (Retoure), Josef-Orlopp-Straße 55, Berlin, so a £18.49 set of pads that turns out to be for the wrong chassis variant goes back across the Channel on your card.

£3.95 buys the Safe Order option, which stretches that 14 days to 200 days from delivery. That is a genuinely long window by any retail standard and cheap for what it does, with four exclusions to note: it covers only items sold directly by AUTODOC, not marketplace stock, and it does not apply to bulky items, core parts or tyres. It is bought per order rather than set on the account, so it has to be remembered each time, and it does not cover return postage either.

Core parts deserve their own paragraph. Buying a remanufactured starter, alternator or caliper means paying a core charge on top of the price and getting it back when the old unit arrives in Berlin. The window is generous — "the used core part should be sent within one year from the date of purchase" — but processing takes 6–8 weeks from arrival at the warehouse, the postage is again yours, and the charge is refused outright if the old unit has "severe damage or cracks in the housing", arrives corroded, incomplete or disassembled, or turns out to be a different category of part or a different power output from the one ordered.

And if a dispute goes nowhere, there is no third party to appeal to. The terms state plainly that "AUTODOC is not willing or obliged to participate in alternative dispute resolution proceedings before an Alternative Dispute Resolution entity". There is no ombudsman scheme covering online parts retail in any case, so the realistic escalation route is a card chargeback or a small claim — and the company page we read carries an email address and no telephone number.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 2 October 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.