Buy your .car domain today

Funded automotive and mobility brands are the main buyers, alongside manufacturers registering defensively to keep a name away from someone else. hey.car belongs to heycar, the used-car marketplace backed by Volkswagen Financial Services, and drop.car runs a parking and vehicle-logistics platform.

The scale tells the story: fewer than four hundred .car names exist worldwide. That is a very small club, which is exactly why short one-word names remain available.

For an independent garage, a single dealership or a mobile valeting business, the annual outlay is hard to justify against a .com or a country-code extension. The extension rewards businesses where the name itself is a strategic asset.

No, .car has no eligibility restrictions whatsoever. The registry policy states plainly that no prerequisites limit who may apply, and individuals register on the same terms as companies.

This is worth saying clearly because the market says otherwise. Several registrar pages imply the extension is for automotive websites only, and some resellers go further and claim you must prove industry affiliation. Neither reflects the registry’s own published policy.

What does apply is standard: registry-reserved names, the acceptable use policy and the usual UDRP and URS dispute procedures if you register someone else’s trademark.

The three are closely matched rather than strictly identical. They share a registry, the registry publishes them at the same recommended figure, and comparing sellers puts them within a few dollars of each other, so cost rarely decides between them.

That frees you to choose on how the name reads. drive.car and drive.cars sit at the same published rate, so the only real question is which reads better, the singular sounding like a product and the plural like a marketplace.

Check all three before committing. The name you want may be taken on one and free on the others, and since the outlay is comparable, availability is often the deciding factor.

Yes, you can run business email on a .car domain, such as service@yourbrand.car. Matching the inbox to the site keeps one identity across quotes, finance paperwork and trade correspondence, which matters in a business built on documents.

Given the annual cost, most owners point the name at both the website and the mail rather than treating it as a redirect. Getting only half the value from a premium name is an odd choice.

Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC before sending. Dealership mail carries finance details and buyers are primed for fraud, so authentication is worth doing properly on day one.

Yes, a newly registered .car domain can point at an existing Wix site without rebuilding it or losing content. Dealers commonly do this when moving from a long descriptive address to a short branded one.

Your previous domain can keep working in parallel, so printed signage, third-party listing sites and existing inbound links do not break the day you switch.

Set the .car name as the primary address and redirect the old one, rather than leaving both live as equals. That consolidates your search authority on the new name and keeps your traffic reporting readable.

The honest trade is a known annual cost against a one-off purchase. A one-word .car name may be available now at the published yearly rate, where the equivalent .com can cost far more as a single aftermarket purchase, when the holder is willing to sell at all.

Search engines treat .car exactly as they treat .com, so this is a branding and availability decision rather than an SEO one. Nothing about the extension helps or hurts your rankings.

The practical test is simple: does an exact-match name change how customers find and remember you? For a marketplace or a consumer-facing mobility brand it often does. If a good .com is available for your name, that remains the lower-risk choice.

A .car domain is considered a premium namespace because it has a higher-than-average registration and renewal cost set by the registry. The extension was positioned as a premium automotive-focused domain from its launch, making .car domains more expensive than many other domain extensions.

The higher price reflects the extension’s strong relevance to the automotive industry. A short, descriptive .car domain can be particularly valuable to car brands, dealerships, automotive services, parts businesses and other companies working in the sector.

For businesses in the automotive space, the cost can make sense when the domain name itself is memorable, closely matches the brand or clearly communicates what the business does.

Broadly yes. The registry publishes the same recommended figure for registration and renewal, so .car does not drop to a small maintenance fee after the first year, and at some sellers the renewal is higher than the opening price.

That makes it a recurring operating cost rather than a one-time purchase. The right way to evaluate it is a three or five year total, alongside your hosting and marketing lines, rather than as a single entry in a launch budget.

One consequence people miss: because the cost does not taper, an unused .car name is a permanent drain. Register the one you will actually build on, not three variations you might use later.