Mystery shoppers get to work

The bad weather means many people have rushed to buy winter tyres, but if you want to do the same youll have trouble finding any before January.

Mystery shoppers target tyre centres
What Car? mystery-shopped dozens of tyre centres across the UK, looking for winter tyres for two of the most popular cars in the UK: a 2007 Ford Focus 1.6 Zetec and a 2009 BMW 320d.

Both of our cars come on 16-inch wheels with 205/55 tyres, the most popular size in the UK. However the BMW uses run-flat tyres, while the Ford uses standard rubber.

We called 40 tyre outlets all over the country and discovered that finding winter tyres for our cars was harder than expected.

Click through the following pages to see how the mystery shoppers got on...