Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Buying a car

So we bought our new used car. Buying a car here is very tricky. You can, of course, buy new and spend $30k, $40k, $50k NZ and upwards (remember, now we’re living on NZ dollars). But that’s often a waste in the US and it definitely is a waste here. Not only because most Kiwis don’t make enough to afford a new car on the lower salaries so you are in massive debt, but also because auto theft here is rampant. There was a huge article just yesterday in the Sunday NZ Herald discussing the problem. It said that one car is stolen every 15 minutes and that thefts rise 30 percent during school holidays. This is primarily due to the fact that cars are stolen by younger kids and taken on crazy joy rides, parts are stripped, and then the cars are dumped. Often the car is recovered—but in what shape??!! Auckland city and surrounding have the worst stats, as you might expect. Fortunately for us, Nelson region has the lowest.

Although we were aware of this problem, it was helpful for us in shopping to talk to all sorts of folks about the problem because we heard some additional insight. We were told to avoid all Subarus—they are highly desirable by car thieves; this was confirmed by the newspaper article. We were told to purchase something with scratches and dings, the newer looking cars at any age are also highly desirable. Still, sometimes there’s just nothing to be done if you take all precautions and some gang of kids wants your car, I guess.

Don and I decided to look for the best deal we could get on either a mid-90s small 4-door sedan like an older Nissan Sentra (US reference) or same year on a small wagon (NOT a station wagon) like a little Subaru Impreza (again US reference) so that we could haul things. Station wagons are big here as a substitute for SVUs, which are pretty much non-existent save your Land Rovers and such. Since petrol is 1.70 per litre—yes, that is $6.80 NZ per gallon, or $4.15 US per gallon—it is cheapest to get the smallest engine you can tolerate. Plus, smaller overall is better: the spaces on main and side roads as well as parking lots and garages are so, so, so tight, that having too wide a car could pose a problem. You won’t see a car (at least not in Auckland) that doesn’t have scratches on the side mirrors or side body or some sort of dent on it. Driving is sport here, I think! And you’d think I would like that, but guess what . . . not!!

There are a variety of ways to buy used cars: private sellers, car yards (used dealers), car auctions, and car fairs. Aside from buying from a private seller, one is most likely to find the majority of used cars are directly imported from Japan and other Asian countries. They are sold by their Japanese owners en masse and shipped here. How you buy your recently-in-Japan car is what is important, then. We decided against a private seller simply because we didn’t have the time to pursue this option. We also don’t have a mechanic who could help us with a once-over. But next time this is probably how we’d do it, despite the fact that there is no guarantee that the Kiwi owner hasn’t also gotten the car from Japan too!

We had planned to attend 2 major Auckland car fairs over the weekend. At a car fair, sellers just come and bring their cars and individual buyers look them over, etc. It’s like a place where you can park your for sale car all day and have buyers walk by. We went to the Saturday car fair—there were about 6 cars there. Granted, it was still 10am or so, but we didn’t have the time to hang around. I guess “major” is a relative term. The larger fair, the Ellerslie fair, occurs on Sundays, but we had been told a lot of backpacker-type cars are sold at Ellerslie—these are cars that tourists use when they come here so they are much cheaper, lower class, more beater-type cars. FYI if you’ve not visited NZ it is quite common—and often recommended—to tour the country with a car but to buy an older beater car at a car fair and when you are done, sell the car at a car fair months or weeks later before you leave.

Car yards are your basic used car lot. Some are adjoined to new dealers too. We found many of these lots sell cars above $10k NZ. One fellow at a car fair also told us they are marked up by as much as $2-4k as well. We later learned what some of this markup was . . .

Car auctions were really interesting. You basically go to the auction 4 hours early, check out all the cars they have, test drive what you want, ask questions, etc. Then you sit at the auction and wait for your car, bid your price, etc. Individual sellers go this route too, giving their car to the auction to sell off. But mostly Japanese imports. You can opt to pay for an on-site mechanical check (recommended), but you’d have to do this for every car you might be interested in bidding on. Plus every car has additional fees to top off the final auction price: these fees can include the cost to license, to bring into the country and register for the first time in NZ, a road fee to transport, warranties, etc. etc. etc. So you may get a better price on the car itself at a car auction, but we figured that the fees to top off the auction price could be $1500 so it comes close to the car yards anyway. The cars at both yards and auctions come in from Japan pretty stripped and both places have to “fill in the blanks,” so to speak, but the yards have a more vested interest in selling you a car that is fully fit for the road—including things like the radio. At the auction, you bid, you win, it’s yours as is only.

We found a 1997 Toyota Corolla “Sprinter” touring wagon with 88k on it that fit all of our criteria at a car yard. We wanted either a Nissan or Toyota or Honda brand, we had hoped to find a smaller wagon for hauling, and it had to have relatively low miles. We had expected to find an older model for our price, but we ended up with the 1997 and negotiated the price down a bit as well. The car seemed well fit except for going over humps (speed bumps) so the car yard is replacing the shocks. Shocks are replaced, but there is still a noise in the front and the car only starts after a couple of puffs, so there are likely some things needing repair. We are having our own inspection on Wednesday and hope struts aren’t at issue, but realistically we expect to have some repairs to do.

Just in case you were wondering, used car salesmen (and their managers) are the same everywhere. No differences at all! We walked out of that place on several occasions needing a shower. Some things never change.

Here is a photo of Don with our new auto!

2 Comments:

At Wed Jul 12, 01:08:00 pm NZST, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Good luck with your new car! I hope those "puffs" aren't anything serious....... Porter now sleeps with us every night and follows us around all the time, just like you said. We just love him!
Love, Mom and Richard

 
At Wed Jul 12, 04:55:00 pm NZST, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Woohoo Puff the magic wagon...oh yes, that so IS a station wagon, just because it doesn't have wood panelling doesn't mean anything! okok, I will stop giving you greif. Oh wait, I can't I knew you wouldn't love driving as a sport, well not if it meant dings in your car...you are very protective of your cars Angela, kind of like Star with her lil toy. As someone else previously said, I hope that the puffing isn't anything too serious. Hmm, maybe puff the magic wagon will stick.....Oh tell Don melo is having weed issues again.

 

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