Model Change

Lately consumers in Japan are getting cleverer and buying cars at auction is now widely accepted. In the car auction business, our company is quite well known. I guess that a large number of people check our website before purchasing a new car at auction. We do have lots of people actually visiting our website. Our name being shown near the top of Yahoo & Google Search and our precious customers writing about us on their blog or online notice boards, we are getting a lot more enquiries than before. (Thank you very much for this!)

The latest trend is more customers enquiring about purchasing late model cars, less than three years after the first registration, not cars of more than 5 years old. Most new cars come with its manufacturer’s 3 year guarantee. If you buy one of these at auction, by asking the dealer for the succession of the guarantee straight away, your car will still be fixed for nothing (almost) at the dealer if anything happens within the 3 years: this provides security to the customers.

However, this trend has changed slightly this year. More people want the newest cars of the current models. But the numbers of certain types of cars listed are getting less. Because there are not many on the list, customers have to wait for a long time until they see the car listed; then even when some are listed, if they lose the auctions they cannot get what they want. There are quite a few similar cases like this happening. This is because people stopped buying bland new cars. No one buys new cars, so there are not enough used cars. Consumers became reluctant in spending money and because of high oil prices, sales of new cars have dropped dramatically and there are less new model cars around.

Japanese car markets have been stimulated by changing models every now & then. There are two types: full-model change in which cars look totally different from the original ones and minor change in which they only change bits & pieces to improve the existing models. Manufacturers do full-model changes every 4 years and minor changes every 1-2 years. At full-model change, manufacturers spend money in advertisement for aggressive sale. But if they cannot sell them after a full-model change, it provides serious trouble to the manufacturers.

In Europe, they do not do full-model changes as often. When the design becomes too old, they check the comfortableness, performance and safety and sometimes they chose a full-model change as a result. So some well designed cars are sold for more than 10 years without a single model change. For example, Porsche, Audi TT and Volkswagen New Beetle are always in the same shape. Looking the same, they change minor bits by persistent effort: this is European. Unfortunately, even European cars are struggling in new car sales. Especially in fuel consumption they have a great disadvantage. Drivers who think about economic efficiency are swapping to Japanese cars to get better gas mileage even though they were using a European car before.

When you buy a new car, it would be best not to buy one soon after its full-model change. Of course manufacturers spend time before that but it is likely to have some troubles even then. A year later, after some minor changes would be the best time to avoid these troubles when they have fixed all the reported troubles.

We, at JPC, give you information and good advice individually after checking the numbers of the cars at auction & the price fluctuations. Not worrying about model change, there are some reasonably priced and attractive cars which are the last line of a model. They are not so popular but have a high-quality finish as a car. Please do not hesitate to ask us any questions.


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(Editor)
JPC TRADE CO.,LTD.
Kato building 4F, 1-1-2 Furuishiba, Koto-ku, Tokyo
Japan Used Motor Vehicle Exporters Association (JUMVEA)
TEL : +81-3-5245-7731
FAX : +81-3-3643-4955