The state of the Car Market

Let's face it, cars are cheap nowadays!

Back in the old days a car would start to break down regularly after it had covered about 30,000 miles and by the time it was five years old the rust would start to show through the bodywork. After 10 years the vast majority of cars were fit only for the scrapheap but engineering standards and metal treatments have improved dramatically over the last couple of decades and as a result cars are not deteriorating at anything like the speed they did in the days of so-called planned obsolescence; so we are keeping them longer. This has not pleased the car manufacturers which have found themselves, even before the credit crunch, having to store expensive vehicles en masse in huge parking lots near to docks and rented disused airfields. Result: prices have declined to the level where most car companies worldwide are losing money or at least failing to make sufficient profit to keep them viable in the long term.

Where does this leave the car buyer? For a start, cars have never been so affordable as they are now and they have never represented such excellent value for money. Most vehicles that are bought today are still likely to be giving an excellent service 10 years hence so unless we are the type of people who just enjoy the smell of new leather seats there is little possibility that we will need to buy another vehicle for a long, long time to come! Indeed, second-hand prices are so low compared to the price of new cars that it is not really a good economical proposition to sell a used car in order to buy a new one, and trade-in values have fallen dramatically. The future for the car industry as a whole looks extremely grim; the future for the car buying public looks very rosy indeed for the foreseeable future.

You can get an excellent deal here for direct line car insurance