Car buyers generated around one million online motor finance quotes on each of the key days of the Christmas and New Year holidays.

On Christmas Eve, more than 1,200,000 quotes were generated followed by another 883,000 on Christmas Day.

New Year’s Day was similarly busy, with 1,217,000. This level is lower than the 1.5m seen on a typical December day, but is still substantial bearing in mind the demands of the holiday period, said James Tew, director of motor dealer technology specialist iVendi.

"At a time of year when most car dealerships of all kinds are very quiet in terms of footfall or have closed their doors, there is still a lot of website activity from customers who actively looking at buying a car," he said.

"Between 2pm and 3pm on Christmas Day, when most of us are sitting down to Christmas dinner with our families, 13,000 online motor finance quotes were generated, meaning that dealerships were still effectively open for business."

The figures are taken from an analysis of iVendi’s Quoteware e-commerce platform, which is used by finance companies and more than 600 new and used car and van dealers to add an online finance quote capability to their core website.