Thinking of buying a new car?
Every year here at The Weekend Australian we try to give you a few hints to avoid being completely done over. If you want a reprint of our complete guide to buying a car in 800 words or less, just email me.
Being in the car caper I naturally have a lot of good friends who are dealers (car dealers, that is). So remember the words of my industry pal who said: “Buy your car off me. You might as well be ripped off by a friend rather than someone you don’t know.”
Today we are going to focus on duds and turkeys. You won’t read this anywhere else so cut this column out and put it on the fridge or copy and paste it to one of your internet devices (like the fridge).
Consumer Reports is a non-profit outfit in the US that actually has its own test tracks and gathers big data from consumers. As usual this year they published their list of the least satisfying cars and the most unreliable ones. The “turkeys”, as they so quaintly call them, include: the Kia Rio, the Jeep Compass and Patriot, the Hyundai Velostar, the Mercedes CLA and the Nissan Altima.
The most unreliable are the Ford Mustang (I am heartbroken about this) with 17 potential trouble spots, the Fiat 500L “with the worst reliability scores among all cars”, the Mercedes S Class (“reliability has been well below average”), the Ford Fiesta and the Tesla Model X.
The cars with the highest satisfaction (but not necessarily reliability) are the Tesla S and the Porsche Cayman, Macan and 911. Talking of Porsches, Mecum is auctioning a beautiful 2015 918 Spyder Weissach today at Anaheim. The only one to come into the US without paint, it has an engine of about a million kilowatts that’s good for 350km/h on your local freeway. Drive away today for $2.3 million.
All cars are an emotional purchase, so buy what you really like.
But you should at least have a look at the Consumer Reports and www.which.co.uk/l/cars websites. Use the popular road tests to inform yourself, but you aren’t going to drive your car on the racetrack, even when you are blasting off in the traffic lights grand prix the launch control won’t be all that much use and most of the time, unless it’s wet on the way home, you won’t be driving sideways.
If there is one industry that is ready for disruption, it’s the retail car industry. Unless you have a PhD in new and used vehicle trading including a specialty in accessories, trailing commissions and negotiations, you are never going to get the best of the salesperson. You’d be better off thinking about new cars as simply a way to sell finance, spare parts and servicing.
In many dealerships, margins on the cars can be as low as $300 and on some they lose money. So while service and parts only account for 15 per cent of sales revenue they account for more than 50 per cent of the profit. Finance and insurance is about 30 per cent of the bottom line.
At the same time, we are seeing used-car values dropping. When you can buy a new car with five years’ warranty for $16,000, it’s hard to pay $18,000 for an eight-year-old car with 100,000km on the clock.
Moving to eight-year-old cars that are still alive takes us to the Improved Production Nationals at Phillip Island on November 25. Tasmanian Ray Hislop has a wonderful 2008 Ford Falcon FPV GT (about $18,000 on Gumtree) that is slightly faster down the straight than a brand new 2016 Holden V8 Supercar.
Ray won’t have it all his own way on the Island, with 140 other ancient pieces of metal vying for the Lindsay Fox Memorial Linfox model truck.
South Australia’s Mark Ruta will be in his 1970s Mazda 808 ($6000 on eBay) and Matt Cherry is driving his very fast Monaro all the way from WA.
Now talking about the Chinese, how good is it to see the MG Motorsport Team announcing its intention to compete in the 2017 Australian Production Car Series.
No, MG isn’t British any more, which is a good thing because they probably don’t use Lucas (Prince of Darkness) parts. In fact, the whole show is owned by Shanghai motor giant SAIC. Luckily for MG, they have partnered with Brock Racing Engineering and James Brock will be No 1 driver.
Given I am a huge Peter Brock fan, despite this year’s terrible telemovie, and a fan of James, I am sure the car will be competitive.
This is a shortened version of the original article. To read the rest go to:http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/car-buyers-lets-sort-the-good-from-the-duds-and-turkeys/news-story/4d4abd0e12223491b53a1534f13c23c3
