Death of the list price This creates the fascinating situation in which monthly payments for cars with a higher list price can be actually lower than those for cars priced below them, simply because their resale value is better. We compared a Mini Cooper with a list price of £16,199 with a Renault Clio TCE Dynamique at £14,690: with the same deposit, finance length and annual mileage, the Renault's PCP figure of £223 was £5 per month more expensive than that for the Mini. According to both Jackson and BMW's Douglas, buyers are becoming conditioned into comparing monthly payments by a product that nearly all of us have but very few can name the hardware cost of: the smartphone. "My kids think a smartphone costs £1," says Douglas. Jackson suggests that the type of buyers of more youthful cars such as the DS3 and Mini understand the smartphone model. "They're younger, so they're much more used to buying on that type of agreement," she says. And just as smartphone providers bundle texts, calls and download data into the monthly figure, so car buyers are increasingly bundling free insurance, servicing and maintenance into the deal. Witness Peugeot's Just Add Fuel deals, in which petrol or diesel is, theoretically, the only additional cost. The advantage to the car maker is that it can react instantly to competitors' deals with one of its own. Throw a bit more financial assistance behind a package and suddenly you've got an attractive £199 a month offer that doesn't draw negative attention to a slow-selling car that "£4,000 off list price!" might. Or, as Jackson at Citroën put it, "We're no longer the king of the cashback." If the private buyer is increasingly ignoring the list price, then the company car driver will loudly applaud its demise. Business deals account for about half of all the UK's new car sales, and fleet managers have been paying monthly lease rates for many years. Yet that makes it doubly crazy that the amount of company car tax a driver pays is linked to the list price, the price that nobody pays any more. Least of all fleet managers, who, when they're not leasing, are screwing the maximum amount of discount out of car companies. The final nail in the coffin for the list price could be the increasing take-up of electric cars, which are already challenging the norms. Renault quotes a list price for its electric vehicle (EV) range, including the Zoe supermini, minus the expensive bit - the battery - which has to be leased monthly. BMW hasn't followed that route with its i3 electric supermini, which goes on sale in November, putting a lot of effort into removing the traditional barriers to EV ownership. Chief among these is the option of BMW Access, which allows owners to borrow other BMW or Mini vehicles for longer trips. That scheme will be available as part of four bolt-on packages costing from £40 to £80 per month, which also cover servicing and charging costs. This makes the buying process less like a straightforward transaction and more like choosing a mobile phone contract. The downside of this creeping shift to monthly payments is that not all finance schemes are born equal. An attractive price might hide the fact that it's a longer period than the normal three years, or come with shorter annual mileage limits than the usual 10,000. It could also prevent the usual haggling (although buyers might welcome this). And right now there's no way of comparing manufacturer-quoted monthly figures across a number of brands, like you can with list prices in the back of a car magazine. It's hard enough to work out what the monthly figure would be from the car maker's own website. Buyers on these finance deals still own the car, but that could be the next feature to disappear as personal lease deals grow: pay a flat monthly fee and hand it back at the end of the agreed term, instead of the PCP's option to pay the difference and keep the car. "Predominately this has been for companies, but there is growing demand for consumers," says Jackson, who reckons the current take-up of about five per cent of Citroën's sales will rise fast. And further into the future, even comparing monthly prices could be old hat as car sharing (aka car clubs) grows in popularity. As with all the major car makers, BMW has a stake in this localised take on car hire and predicts it will be a billion euro business for the company by 2020. Douglas is bullish: "Who knows? The next generation may even think in terms of cost per minute rather than list prices.