As someone who’s been forced out of London by the sharp rise in property prices and rents over the past couple of years, I’ve been forced to re-evaluate my transport options, as of late. Previously, the tube was sufficient for 95% of my travel, and so one car was enough for my flat of two.
Since leaving my former concrete confines for a more leafy suburb in the commuter belt, however, the need for a second car has become increasingly evident. As a result, many of my weekends this month have seen me searching Auto Trader and Motors.co.uk, and visiting a number of dealers to try and find the right option.
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Having spent about a year and a half speaking with the industry about dealer education, and about when is the right time to introduce finance into the sale process, it was nice to finally speak to a few dealers as a ‘customer’ as opposed to as a ‘journalist’.
After visiting around 10 dealers ranging from franchised dealers in Hertfordshire to independent dealers in Hampshire, I came to the realisation that I’d actually rather save for a larger deposit then get a car right now. Not wanting to let several weekends go to waste, I thought I’d give a few thoughts I had while on the road.
The first is that, encouragingly, in most cases it’s not too hard to figure out what finance options the dealers are offering. In the larger franchised dealers (I won’t name names here) the monthly cost of the car on a PCP deal was usually found in the car window – below the headline price. Anyone coming to these dealers with a monthly figure in mind won’t have difficulty in establishing if they’re able to get the car.
As my budget limitations came more firmly into view, and I started looking at the smaller, independent dealers, finance coverage became more patchy – some dealers were very good about posting this information on all of their cars, others were not. In one, I saw no evidence of the finance they offered until I asked a dealer about my options.
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By GlobalDataAll dealers were, however, very clear about who the finance came from, with signs in the windows of their main office.
At one location, I seriously considered a purchase (a 2012 Toyota, if you must know), and had a slightly longer conversation with the dealer about how I could fund a purchase of the car. I am pleased to say he seemed quite knowledgeable about what options were open to me, and we had a good conversation on some of the pros and cons of using finance versus buying with cash, and the types of finance I might want to use. Obviously, being a used car sales person, the dealer tried to explain away some of the problems with the car (“nobody uses air conditioning anyway”), but from a finance side I was certainly not pushed into making a rash decision, or in a direction which clearly didn’t suite my needs.
Now, as I said, this was only my experience of visiting a few dealers, and talking to even fewer, and shouldn’t be taken as any sort of in-depth research. And while I didn’t end up with a car (it turns out I’m quite a car snob) I came away from the experience more positive about the average dealer than I was expecting.
