The future of buying a new car

Is this off the back of Mercedes announcing that discounts are a thing of the past? A one price for everyone model.

I'm sure Merc can dictate pricing currently whilst their order books are full for the next 6 months but wait until over supply kicks in. There's only one way to motivate buyers, become Porsche or Ferrari or apply discount.

Certainly if your BMW Audi and Merc they compete each year on volume. Don't tell me you can sell a load of B-Classes at a fixed price.

I do believe the old franchise model is a bit archaic however. If your interested in a certain car you should be able to pick up the phone and book a test drive for at least 24hours rather then turn up at a dealer and get the 15minutes round the block that appears to be the norm.

I used CarWow. Specced the car and waited for tenders.

If I wanted to choose between cars I’d probably put one day aside to go and look at them all then go home and use CarWow again.

Then again I have bought few bikes on line and in the old days from newspaper ads unseen and they’ve all been great. Apart from that Ducati. It was very shiny and nice but ultimately shit as an ownership proposition.

I have for years thought that the car dealership system is not fit for purpose. It's the old organ grinder and monkey issue writ large, and even worse as the organ-grinder does not even employ the monkey - he's a sub contractor. As a buyer, I'm only allowed to talk to the monkey. And as the organ-grinder, the manufacturer relies on the monkey to be their point of contact with the customer. And as comments on here over the years show, there are some pretty useless monkeys out there.

So manufacturers owning the dealer network has always seemed to me to be a sensible route. The online v showroom thing is totally separate and why some in the car industry think that it ought to be any different for them sows their utter inability to see the future.

Many other industries have the same dynamic - and issues. When I started out in IT, a lot of business software - including high-end and expensive systems - were still sold by distributors. Authors wrote code, distributors had the sales, installation and support infrastructure - and many did very nicely out of that. But slowly, customers demanded more and more to talk to the authors and IP owners, and it ended up with many distributors being bought out by the software authors.

I think BMW are now 12.9% Apr on used and with the new legislation in place you can't even haggle this down. Its got to cause some real issues. Having just looked at my mortgage I am going to be paying the equivalent of an M2 a month more in my monthly payments due to the rate increase! That focusses on the mind on what's important.

The finance costs are having a dramatic effect because as with house prices, cheap finance has been a big driver behind list price increases and now the monthly payments are a lot higher buyers are finally waking up to just how expensive cars have got and are less likely to spend extra on options (which the premium brands rely on for their profits).

+1 unsurprisingly!

I have had a client cancel his Cayenne because he was told that the interest rate will be based on the rate applicable to the time at which the car arrives and he is just feeling it is an expense/liability that he doesn't really need to take on. His Discovery can soldier on for another couple of years.

Indeed so. I think a wider issue is that the customer today in Europe increasingly can’t have what they actually want. It will only get worse as we draw closer to 2030, and other European countries have similar ICE-bans. It does make one rather jealous of the Americans, who not only can buy what they want, but also get it delivered quicker because unlike in socialist Europe, interesting ICE cars aren’t vandalised and denounced as climate-wreckers. The car makers have been prioritising production for the US over Europe sales for some time. It will only get worse, as Euro 7 and the increasing guff that Euro NCAP requires sucks profitability out of selling cars here – none of which is needed to sell cars in America.

Which washing machine do you find more exciting? Bosch or Zanussi? Feels like the future of motoring. Unless synthetic fuels can be accepted.

I agree about not buying a car unless I’ve tried it. That said, technically speaking I haven’t tried the latest generation Macan GTS that I have arriving. But having driven an earlier GTS, a Turbo and the current S, I figured it wasn’t essential to do so.

Almost all of the new cars being registered over the past year were ordered many months ago,so to me,the registration figures are meaningless. Order a new car now, and not only had the price risen hugely over the past year or two, but the chances are that you will still have a long wait. Used car prices are still stupidly high, and there are still supply issues of many models. I thought I'd try to swap the Polo for something with auto transmission (I'd wanted an auto and was going to treat myself for my 60th, over 3 years ago but circumstances contrived against me) but there's nothing on sale that fits the bill. As one example, and no doubt many of you will laugh at what you see as my bizarre taste in cars) there's not a single Renault Scenic in the last shape sold in the UK on sale in the south east with the 1.5dCi engine and auto transmission. Even in my preferred colour choice of yellow with black roof and manual there are just 1 or 2. I've contacted a few Renault dealership and they're not even interested in taking my details in case one comes in. The car market, new and used, is in a crazy state and has been for some time. Cars in strong demand, such as recent Polos and Audi A1s, are selling used for about what they cost new 2 or 3 years ago....and worse still, buyers are paying the asking price.

I too was surprised when I heard about the A Class and B Class but, I'm assuming, someone's done the numbers and decided lower volumes, higher margins is preferable to continually chasing higher volumes and ever decreasing margins. The fact that you referred to Mercedes as "a premium mainstream manufacturer", something they've become, as opposed to a manufacturer of premium, luxury cars - which is what they traditionally were, perhaps highlights the issue.
Mercedes used to boast they could spend an extra 300 euros per car on engineering excellence and could translate this into an extra 3000 euros on the selling price. I'm not sure that's been the case for quite a while.

They might do a hatchback version of the C-Class to cater to the A & B Class audience...

So thats no CLA, GLB, A- Class, B Class or GLA but surely they will be replacing the A-class chassis with a EQA/B etc?