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I guess new car sales figures will be dropping even further then
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Good, about time more people started buying British.
No thank you - I'll always buy based on the engineering quality, drive and safety of the product as well as value for money and customer service. If that's a British-built (though many parts are sourced from overseas) car, then great, if not, so be it.
People used to 'buy British' in the 1970s when we built (compared to other nations) very poor quality vehicles. Whilst UK plants such as Nissan's Suderland plant are very efficient and good at what they do (one if not the most efficient in the EU), in my view, the quality of the cars (the fault of the designers and their alliance with Renault), in my opinion, has dropped considerably since the mid-to late 1990s; only those that are wholy designed in Japan using Nissan-designed parts would be worth buying in my view.
Toyotas built in the UK are fine but boring and not, again, in my view much cop to drive unless that involves tootling around town below 30mph. Hondas are better, but I'm not so keen on the styling in recent years AND, most importantly, I think they are very expensive (often 20%+ more for equivalent products) compared to other Japanese makes, even ones like Mazda who manaufacture their cars in Japan and ship them to the EU for sale, compared to Swindon-built equivalents. I'm also not keen on JLR cars anyway, and besides, they're out of my budget range and, in my view, aren't renowned for their engineering quality/reliability, so no loss there. The less said about Vauxhalls, the better, and I don't like Minis. Not really much left to tempt me...
All this being said, if there's something on sale (whatever the product) that is of equal quality and price designed/built in the UK that I like, then I would more than consider it, especially when it comes to penalising EU countries whose governments and EU officials have been openly hostile to /deliberately holding them up our Brexit negotiations, such as France, Spain and Germany.
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Surprised to hear this analysis as I was under the impression that sales of new cars are falling.
However, although I'm very unlikely ever to buy a new car, I would be interested to hear one of our experts analyse the likely effects of a rise in new car prices on the used car market.
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Good, about time more people started buying British.
Which particular British cars do you feel we should be buying more of?
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There's the problem, people haven't and look where we are. i'm not going to sit here listing British brands under foreign ownership, we all know them. Point is it's in the national interest to buy British whilst we still can and keep these brands going, or risk losing them forever. Longer term I hope for a revival of domestic industry spurred on by us not being constrained by the Franco-German internal market. No country on our scale and knowledge base should have to rely on imported cars, we aren't some banana republic.
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There's the problem, people haven't and look where we are. i'm not going to sit here listing British brands under foreign ownership, we all know them. Point is it's in the national interest to buy British whilst we still can and keep these brands going, or risk losing them forever. Longer term I hope for a revival of domestic industry spurred on by us not being constrained by the Franco-German internal market. No country on our scale and knowledge base should have to rely on imported cars, we aren't some banana republic.
People stopped buying British cars because they were rubbish. You say we are not a 'banana republic' (no idea what that means, but it sounds very derogatory to whoever you consider are?). You seem to be turning this into being about all British made products, but it is about cars.
So, I ask again, which British cars would you recommend forum members to buy?
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I think they already have risen. Take one example, the list price of the cheapest Focus is now over £20k. I know nobody pays list but its indicative of an upwward trend.
In addition to the points made in earlier posts a further factor is the move of private "buyers" to PCP etc where the monthly payments is the figure many people look at rather than the list price or indeed the amount they will shell out over years of the never never. Its a licence for manufactures to jack up prices as the price is smoothed over a period and, arguably, partly offset by a higher residual in £ terms.
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<< People stopped buying British cars because they were rubbish. You say we are not a 'banana republic' (no idea what that means, but it sounds very derogatory to whoever you consider are?). You seem to be turning this into being about all British made products, but it is about cars. >>
Speaking generally (not just about cars) I think typical Brits like to be seen - or be able to claim - doing overseas things. Witness all the foreign holidays, number of foreign dishes and ingredients on menus, amount of foreign food, especially fruit, on supermarket shelves. Not to mention millennials' obsession with travelling halfway around the world just for a stag-do. Compare the French, most of whom holiday in France and only drink French wine, for example. You may feel that is boringly parochial, but it makes a point (by contrast the Dutch always go somewhere else).
And for some reason we continue to abjectly adopt American pronunciations of many words such as kilometre(/er) and research. I don't know of any English pronunciations adopted by Americans? Does anyone?
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"Compare the French, most of whom holiday in France and only drink French wine"
Presumably apart from the 11,371,209 who visited Spain in 2016, and there's a good chance their "French" wine actually came in bulk from Spain, and was bottled in France.
"France imports more wine than you might think. Last year the country imported a record amount of wine and most of it was cheap bulk wine from Spain. In total France imported 7.2 million hectolitres last year, an increase of 11 % from 2014. 81 % of this was bulk wine and 75 % came from Spain."
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From the BBC website where MPs are questioning major car manufacturers with UK operations:
"Honda UK imports 2 million components a day from Europe on 350 trucks and holds 1 hours worth of stock. It would take 18 months to put customs admin in place but every 15 minutes of delay would cost £850,000 a hour. That's not including WTO tariffs of 10% and 4.5%."
A tiny insight into the EU free market and why prices may well rise. Whilst the proposed Brexit date is 16 months away, major players such as these need clarity in the next 4.
Edited by daveyjp on 14/11/2017 at 16:30
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From the BBC website where MPs are questioning major car manufacturers with UK operations:
"Honda UK imports 2 million components a day from Europe on 350 trucks and holds 1 hours worth of stock. It would take 18 months to put customs admin in place but every 15 minutes of delay would cost £850,000 a hour. That's not including WTO tariffs of 10% and 4.5%."
A tiny insight into the EU free market and why prices may well rise. Whilst the proposed Brexit date is 16 months away, major players such as these need clarity in the next 4.
Or buy oil from any MAJOT supplier of car parts. Speciialy imported by plane and couriered to door in 24 hours.
I assume many MPs have no clue...
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I can't dispute your statistics, ColinH. I can only imagine that the French have changed their habits noticeably since I last considered the matter. At that time the shelves of hypermarkets carried wine which was 90-95% French, tho I suppose some of it may have been imported. The only 'foreign' stuff came from other French-speaking countries like Morocco.
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they can increase the list price as much as they wish, like anything, people will only pay what they consider the correct price to be.
What I am told is happening, financial houses are concerned about the diesel residual price drop off and are increasing costs, especially diesel lease costs to cover any continued negative trend.
Short term, there will be a good opportunity for the budget brands to increase their market share.
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