|
Buying Cars on the Internet In a national newspaper recently, the stock market share price freefall was blamed on the Internet. Their justification for this blame was that the Internet had produced a freely available market where the consumer was provided with the means to compare prices easily. They produced a statement from Tesco who said their profit margin was down to 3%. Therefore the Internet had forced prices down, companies profit margins were down, which directly influenced their stock market share price. Since I was off-loading my Vauxhall Vectra, I thought I'd test their theory... Many friends have recently purchased new imported cars, all saving at least £3,000, although these cars tended to be performance cars in the £20,000+ category. I wasn't after a really expensive car, just a reliable fast car and I'd consider buying a second-hand one. So I dwindled my choice down to three cars, Toyota Celica 190, SAAB 9-3 Aero and a Honda Accord TypeR. You can find some excellent resources for cars at: http://www.ukmd.co.uk , www.carsurvey.org , http://www.carsource.co.uk and http://www.autoexpress.co.uk . For every brand of car, there are loads of related web sites such as the Honda-R club located at: http://www.honda-r.org.uk and a quick search on any engine will provide loads of reviews. I even went down to the local dealers and test-drove some of the cars to see how comfy they were for my height. For importing cars, there are lots of web sites to choose from, but the availability of the models I was interested in tended to be about 6 months! Here are some of the sites with the details I obtained: http://www.oneswoop.com Toyota Celica 190, 6 months |
|
|
|
wait and a saving of £2,500...SAAB 9-3 AERO, 4 months wait and a savings of
£3,400... Honda Accord TypeR wasn't available. European/Japanese Car Importers - Toyota Celica 190, 6 months wait and a savings of £2,021... SAAB 9-3 AERO not available yet... Honda Accord TypeR, 5 months wait and a savings of £3,110. http://www.snoop4.com/- Toyota Celica 190, 5 months wait and a savings of £2,948... SAAB 9-3 AERO not available ... Honda Accord TypeR, 5 months wait and a savings of £3,596. So there's quite a saving to be had by purchasing an imported car and the availability appears to be less if you opt for the more traditional saloon cars. All the above-mentioned sites appear to be professionally developed and I presume if they spent money on that, then the companies should be kosher - although I didn't buy from any of them. I eventually purchased a Honda ex-demo Accord TypeR at a very attractive price from a Honda showroom, although finding this quality second-hand TypeR was quite a difficult task, but find it I did and guess where from? Yep, on the Internet! Finance and Insurance...? |
repayment calculators, which provided me with a monthly repayment figure together with
an APR. I won't list them all here as there's not enough space, but I will
list the outright winners. For finance it was Lombard Direct located at http://www.lombarddirect.com. They absolutely thrashed the competition at a nice 7.4 APR. For insurance I chose Direct Line located at http://www.directline.co.uk. I was warned that the TypeR classed as a 16, would cost me over £1000 and I received quotes close to that figure, but Direct Line insured me fully comp, together with protected no claims for £561. How can the figures be so cheap, well OK, I'm over 40 so the insurance would be cheaper even on an Accord TypeR. I thought I'd investigate and called some of the numbers located on the web sites to verify the figures quoted. The telephonists said they could not match the figure stated on their web site as web site purchases will always be at least 5% cheaper than telephoning because there's no administration involved. So there you have it, it's true, the Internet has forced prices down by giving us a medium where we can compare competitors and because of the Internet, these companies are now open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. BTW If anyone's sad enough like me to be interested in fast cars, a picture of my Accord TypeR is available HERE Be lucky and see you next month... Vince Chin |
|
