Your 4 best ways to save thousands on a new car - even in 2022

Let's talk about how to save thousands on a new car despite current supply problems. Four actionable techniques for you that will minimize the financial pain of a new car purchase, even today…

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In this report I'm going to show you how to save thousands off the price of a new car even today with the market in the inverse position, down under.

Today is unprecedented. I've been a motoring journalist since I had hair, back when Phil Collins started losing his, and I've never before seen supply quite as bad as it is today.

If you've been dead from the neck up since 2019, kind of like the ACCC, and you've just been resurrected, it might surprise you to learn that the developed world has become a quagmire while you were preoccupied.

The car industry, in particular, holds the record for the biggest strategic, economical and logistical stuff-up ever, following its decision to leave itself strategically vulnerable to China in particular. This was thanks to in-house accountants chasing every last possible half-cent on every vital component. Then: Covid hit the car industry >>.

Post-apocalyptic collapse, production is barely getting back to resembling normalcy, except demand for new cars has now eclipsed supply and this heartless status quo is predicted to continue until the end of 2023, or the start of 2024. Used cars are are the same story >>

This means four options are available for you, if you want or need a new car soon.

Before we start, here are some caveats to understand before going into this process:

One: 

You're gonna have to wait for it. Lead times are absurd on some cars such as Toyota hybrids, LandCruisers, Subaru Forester, Kia Sorento etc. It's a pretty long list - well over 12 months in some cases; in others, of course, they can't even tell you when.

I heard a whisper recently that model-year 23 Forester is going to be delivered sometime in 2024 - they generally start making MY23s in the second half of calendar 2022.

So, be as flexible as you can be on make, model, colour and spec - you might find a competitor with only a three to six month wait, which is the current car industry equivalent of same-day delivery.

Two:

Dealers are disinclined to discount - that's the bottom line and they're not really ripping you off, they're just doing business like you would if you were them in this situation. There's a queue of people just like you over the horizon, only you can't see them. You all want a new car yesterday, and if you're too much of a hard-case on price, the dealer's just going to brush you aside and go with the next dude, because there's such limited supply.

You and your proclivity to negotiate for less and less money doesn't hurt them in any way, currently. In business, I guess everyone wants to sell every product in their inventory at the highest possible price and when demand exceeds supply, prices go up, discounting evaporates - just look at the housing market.

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TOP TIPS FOR BUYING A NEW CAR IN 2022 & 2023

You can still save thousands and I will detail exactly how, step-by-step now.

TIP 1: DRIVING A HARD BARGAIN

Right now, you really might have to cop it on the chin in terms of the non-negotiability of the drive away price, given the bizarre underlying supply situation. But you have to realize the driveaway price is just not everything when it comes to buying a car. It's just the tip of the dealership rip-off iceberg.

So price the car up at more than one dealer. One of the tactics some dealers are using right now is pumping up their so-called ‘dealer delivery fee’ to essentially whatever they think they can get away with given the current commercial dynamics.

Dealer delivery is mostly a charge that simply covers the cost of getting the car on a truck at the local importer’s logistic holding yard and taking it to the dealership, plus cleaning it up, checking the vital fluids and functionality, and registering it for you.

So delivery's worth maybe 500 bucks but some dealers are currently charging 10 times that on mainstream cars which is insane. Remember, any suggestion by a car salesman that the delivery fee covers the international shipping from the factory to Australia is entirely untrue. Unequivocally, it does not. The importer pays that. International shipping is included in the landed cost of the vehicle - it's part of the wholesale price which the dealer remits to the importer when they buy the car.

So when you shop around make sure you compare delivery fees because there could well be thousands of dollars of difference between different competing dealers.

Here’s some advice if you’ve already signed a contract, but the dealer wants more >>

TIP 2: TRADE-IN VERSUS PRIVATE SALE

Now one of the serendipitous consequences of new car scarcity is that used car prices are at an all-time high and generally, if you're in the market for a new car, you've probably got a used car to dispose of. This is a happy confluence, isn't it?

See some people simply cannot afford to wait for a new car. Such as, if your car got crashed into at the lights last Friday night or something, and the insurer wrote it off. In this case, you're probably gonna need a car Monday morning to get to work.

Sure, you could hire a car in the short term, but hiring a car and waiting 12 months or something, is not really an option. So a used late model car could be looking good to everybody in that situation and of course a lot of people are thinking that right now - because they need a car desperately. The unprecedented demand for used cars has pumped up their price as well, which is good for you if you are selling a used car as part of the acquisition process for a new car.

So if you want to maximize your financial position on this, tell the dealer that maybe you'll think about a trade-in when there's some certainty about the delivery time frame of your car. But sell it privately, because you'll probably get thousands of dollars more than any trade-in and you'll probably sell it pretty quickly as well.

TIP 3: IN-HOUSE FINANCE IS A FARCE

Do not just automatically go for the dealer's finance. Dealership finance is invariably expensive that's one of life's great constants isn't it not as much of a rip-off today since additional consumer protecting regulations were enacted a few years ago now but still comparatively expensive.

Shop around on the finance right and if you are not exactly a mathematical genius or even remotely comfortable crunching those numbers, take a short list of decent-sounding finance offers to your accountant and get them to break it all down and find the best one.

There's absolutely no prerequisite to tip even more thousands of additional dollars of profit into the dealership just because they led you like a lamb to the slaughter into the office of the in-house finance person.

Also, here’s the problem with novated leases >> if that’s on your horizon.

TIP 4: DON’T BUY EXTRAS YOU DON’T NEED

This one is an insidious bottomless pit of unprincipled profiteering, which we strive to insulate our clients from. If the price of the car is the tip, endless add-ons and accessories are the 90 percent of the iceberg lurking below the new car water line, on the showroom floor. Neutral buoyancy, philosophically.

This guy didn’t stand on the X - he married it: Bonnet protectors, headlight covers, weathershields, roof racks, nudge bars, side steps…

Buying a car is an ambush and the anatomy of every ambush on Earth is the same, be it in bandit country or on the showroom floor of your local dealership. In an ambush the other team lies in wait with their weapons zeroed in right and you stroll over and stand on the x, unwittingly. To your brief shock and utter despair dozens of holes get suddenly drilled into you, irrespective of what style of ambush you are in. It's always a bad idea to stand on the X.

Dealerships are such specialists at walking you through their process: where to stand, what to say, how to converse in order to extract information from and use it against you. They’re so choreographed and they use fear and shame to get you across the line on typically a bunch of highly profitable crap you definitely don't need but which, with the right emotional nudge, sounds like a really really good idea in the heat of the moment.

Rust proofing is a classic example, because heaven forbid that you decline this seemingly vital protection. Nobody wants to wake up next week and learn that their recently shiny new shitbox has decomposed overnight, worryingly, into a pile of iron oxide in the friggin driveway. Except with LDV of course - that's in the brochure. if only I'd gone for that rust protection people in this situation say that's the pitch anyway meanwhile back on earth where metallurgy and science actually do matter even still in world modern cars are overwhelmingly galvanized dude they do not rust because they cannot rust.

Rust was much more in 1980s thing and earlier before galvanization became common rust proofing a modern car is completely unnecessary. Maybe not in Canada, where the roads are heavily salted for half the year or something, but certainly here - totally unnecessary.

Modern cars ain’t painted like they used to be: A cathodic bath is science fiction compared with the old ways.

Paint protection: Modern cars have a hard clear coat over the colour. That clear coat does not need protecting. It needs washing every few weeks and detailing, like a polish maybe once or twice a year.

A good idea is to read the fine print on the ceramic paint protection’s five or ten year warranty - I dare you. The annual inspections, the re-treatment, it's almost impossible to comply with all the warranty compliance terms and conditions.

Fabric protection: Just don't keep chooks in the car overnight, try not to keep unsheathed box cutters in your back pocket, and holster you Rambo hunting knife at all times. Fabric protection is not going to help.

The dealer wants to sell you so much ridiculous stuff. Minor damage repair insurance - because heaven forbid that you might actually scratch a wheel and have to deal with the consequences.

It's a new car not a new baby. A car is a machine - it's good to go out of the box. It doesn't need all of those add-ons, its primary purpose is transportation.

Certainly, take care of it, but realize it's going to get scratched and scuffed and generally acted upon by the second law of thermodynamics over time. Everything is a clock, the hands only spin one way; they go from new to old. This is inevitable, it affects everything from humans and computers to plants and rocks.

Things like the in-house insurance like ‘Subaru Insurance’ or ‘Toyota Insurance’ or whatever, it's merely the same double AAMI or GIO insurance policy which you could buy independently over the phone or online. Only the in-house one is white label to the brand and sold to you routinely with a lazy thousand bucks worth of markup or something similar. The list of add-ons is endless.

Window tinting: it's the same tinting from the same dude in the same van whom you can call the day after delivery and have it done in your driveway. Only the dealer's going to charge his customary billion and a half percent markup if he arranges the tinting for you.

Endless accessories: Do you really need that branded roof rack or those window shades and weather shields, or even that ladder rack? All this stuff - and more, obviously - you can get at any aftermarket auto retail store like AutoOne, Repco, SuperCheap Auto or Autobarn, or even an aftermarket 4WD store for more hardcore stuff like snorkels, winches, bullbars, recovery gear and roof racks etc.

The road to dealership rip-off hell is paved with ambushes of exactly this nature. Weaponising your ignorance. Navigating you through waypoints on a carefully constructed new car buying consumer version of Tough Mudder. There’s no good reason for you to stand on every booby trap and have your bank account raided

All of these add-ons are so highly profitable for the dealer but of dubious value at best to you. Fake parts is another issue altogether >>

CONCLUSION

Most people don't like the conflict of disagreement, and that’s perfectly okay. Except you do need to stand up for yourself in these commercial retail environments.

Of course, if you aren’t able to do that, you have options like AutoExpert - it’s literally what we do.

But by the same token, you can still politely decline. Respectful discourse is always the best option, especially given the salesperson and the Ming Moll are just doing their job. But you equally don’t have to feel sorry for them - their kids will get through private school just fine.

You don't have to swear, but simply explaining that you have a tight budget will suffice, because ‘all I really want is the car; if I scuff a wheel or scratch a bumper or get a chip in the windscreen, I'll just deal with that down the track.’

You don't have to stand on every X, you can recuse yourself politely in a dignified way you don't have to agree. Every X you avoid is going to save you hundreds, even thousands.

Even in the current unfavourable economic environment, you can still save money - dude. Go forth and save.

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