Remember a couple or three years ago when the backside dropped out of everything, cars stacked to the sky and still rolling off the lines, no one knew what to do with them or the thousands of nearly new defleets still pouring in from the rental companies, and management cars which are anything but.

Well they ended up selling them cheap just to shift them, and raise desperately needed cashflow, and made huge losses on them too...those who bought well during that period made a once in a lifetime killing and good luck to them..assuming they didn't sign up for some dodgy finance deal to pay for it then lose their own jobs in the yet to peak depression.

Manufacturers learned from that mess, and i doubt it will be repeated, production since cut back to just about enough to maintain that balance of supply and demand.

If you notice, the days of cheap tyre deals seem to be over too, unless you're buying ditchfinders...every time i look up my own sizes the prices have gone up.

Edited by gordonbennet on 13/05/2011 at 22:33

Plus they make less money from shifting city cars and supermini 'downgrades' than the bigger luxury fare.

I bet you could buy a new big petrol engine powered saloon for less than the production cost. But the same wouldn't be true for a small diesel powered car. BMW have long since proved that small car does not equate to econobox. I bet they make more money on each 320d they sell than every 740i which is probably a loss making line.

Car manufacturers can and do cut production when oversupply is a problem

you can still get an astra new shape for less than £10k, but tell us what you have been trying to buy.. then we can judge..

Edited by OldRoverboy on 13/05/2011 at 22:42

I mean that they just won't budge from list price, and their trade in values are worse than I'm getting offered by Motorpoint.

Don't forget that with all the money we printed (quantitative easing) the pound has fallen, so imported cars are more expensive.

I'm reliably informed that there is a shortage of mica to go into mica paint finishes. Local fiat dealer has stopped taking orders with mica paint.

If you are prepared to shop around, walk away and be hard faced - there are plenty of deals to be had.

I know of 4 people who have purchased new or nearly new (60 plate) cars since the turn of the year and all got excellent prices.

Most noticably a brand new 11 plate panda 1.1 active for £5,400 (cash).

The deals are out there, you need to find them.

This site use to be great for dealerships, etc advertising excellent deals but the past year or so, most of the deals are nothing special.

I remember once Honest John posted JCT600 had some astra vans going for silly money after a contract broke down to supply a company, that is the kind of deal the website has been lacking. Advertising 5% of a Q5 is not a deal!

we attempted to sell our car via the autotrader in the past month.

total waste of time.

we ended up getting rid of it via part-ex.

Decent people, buyers and sellers are out there, what we need is some sort of a virtual Masons handshake to recognise one another.

Youre not wrong there. Some of the stuff I have heard lately is staggering, people expecting a 50% reduction in the asking price, people saying they are dead keen on having a look at the car and then saying they just realised they cant afford the insurance, and people saying they we coming to look at the car, but just didn't make it and were never heard of again..

It's threads like this that remind me why I buy cars the way I do -- buy as cheap as possible then keep until it's only worth slightly more than scrap. This way I don't have to deal with either side of the complaints raised here.

This is good in theory, but if you need a reliable car for long distance driving it doesn't stack up really, unless you like beeing stuck on the M6 150 miles from home ! My job depends on the ability of my car to often do 400 miles in a day and I would,nt want to do this in a car that was close to being scrap value !