New Cars

Topics: Cars

We bought a new car this past weekend, and I'd like to add a bit of info that we seem to have picked up along the way. If anyone has any other suggestions or corrections, feel free to fire away.

Tip 1: If you are in the market for a car, try to buy in Feb or early March. Dealers are trying to make their sales quotas for the year and are willing to discount deeper than say if you waited until April.

Tip 2: Along with the buying in Feb/March idea....if you don't take possession of the vehicle until March, you are not paying taxes for the previous year. Granted, in our case, it would have only saved us 2800 yen by taking the car in March rather than Feb.

Tip 3: Work up various scenarios of the vehicle e.g. with panorama roof, with automatic A/C and consider what those features are worth to you over the life of the car not just the upfront cost. Ask yourself if it's worth it to you to pay 70,000 yen for something that you might indeed use for 10 years or longer.

Tip 4: Shop around and let them know that you're looking at other vehicles. Yes, they'll call you and ask you to come every weekend, but it also creates an atmosphere of competition. You can also get various small things along the way: a dozen eggs, etc.

Tip 5: Ask them to clean up the number. (Wendy, perhaps you know how to say that in Japanese.) For example, if their price is 2,150,000 they may drop it additionally to 2,100,000. 50,000 yen is still a fair bit of money saved. Heck even 10,000 is good!

I don't know about other people's experiences, so perhaps we didn't get as good a deal as I think we did, but it ended up being about 7.1% less than the sticker. In addition you could apply for their credit card (BEWARE--ONLY a good idea if you pay off your balances when they come due), charging 300,000 of the car price and you'd get a 10,000 yen rebate.

BM