Which cars should be used as police vehicles

Last weekend, I took my family to the new outlet shopping mall, about an hour drive from Tokyo. Because it was the weekend, lots of families were there like us. Lately, people tend to spend their weekend at large shopping centres and outlet malls out of town. It must be something motorized society has brought in.

Most shops there sell clothes and fashionable sport gears. My wife and daughter went back and forth to several brand shops they had wanted to go to. They were trying desperately to get what they liked. At first I was helping them decide which ones to get but to be honest I do not like shopping, so when I got sick of standing around, I decided to go to a café and to read books.

They spent about 5 hours doing shopping and were quite contented. Although I did not really care what they had bought, seeing them happy I felt relieved that I had done something nice for them as a husband and father; I sometimes feel bad when I am too busy to do anything with them.

Because it was getting dark outside and to avoid a traffic jam, we decided to stop at a public bath nearby and had some local “Soba” for dinner. After having a bit of alcohol myself, my wife was driving home. She just followed back the same motorway we took in the morning at a steady speed for eco-driving. Then out of nowhere, a red “Ferrari Modena” came right behind us with booming roar and flickering his light up & down he was asking us to get out of his way. Panic-stricken, my wife changed the lane without indicating. (This is extremely dangerous, you know… I felt my blood freeze!) On a weekend night, motorways in Tokyo get very busy with large numbers of cars heading back home. I was wondering what was going to happen next. Then within a few seconds, I heard a police car “Skyline GT-R BNR34” with a blast of a siren, was following the Ferrari. The police car overtook us too and the two cars disappeared from our view instantly. They must have been doing around 200Km/hour.

Japanese police cars are usually black & white but motorway patrol vehicles are called “undercover”. There is nothing to tell if they are the police. They look like any private vehicles to detect noncompliance on motorway. When they see an offensive car, the police man in the passenger side rolls the window down to put the siren on the roof, chase the car while asking the driver to stop with a microphone. Seeing a GT-R police car for the first time, I was very excited. I personally like GT-R the best among sport cars. When you drive one, the engine has strong enough power to push you back into the seat. It has a very attractive sound from its exhaust pipe: listening to it you can guess it has a high performance engine, which you can truly enjoy. However, you can feel it better when you drive at high speed, what I saw was only at the “speed limit” allowed on motorway. I envied the policemen who could legally drive at 200Km/hour, feeling the GT-R’s high performance to chase the non-complying offender. If you like cars and are a policeman, you are lucky to have a job which combines fun and profit.

After a while, we saw the Ferrari got caught at a toll gate a few kilometres away. Thinking it overtook us at incredible speed, I thought he will not be released tonight with just a speeding ticket and fines but stay in a jail overnight. (The Ferrari driver looked like a nice middle-aged gentleman. Maybe his car changed his personality and made him think he could outrun a GT-R easily. I have not driven a Ferrari yet but I can tell you that I might find it hard to keep the speed limit…)

I, the other day, heard news that some “Lamborghini Gallardos” were delivered to the police in Italy. A new one of them costs approx. JPY24,000,000!

I guess if you see a Gallardo, you will not venture into a race against it. But aren’t they lucky to be in one of them? Motorway policemen might be a bunch of speed maniacs…


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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

How to ease fatigue from a long drive

It is now autumn in Japan. It still gets to 25 degree Centigrade in daytime and you can get sweaty but in the morning and evening it is getting chiller. Some of our employees have caught cold because of the big difference in the temperature.

Autumn is considered the best season of the year in Japan. You can do anything from reading books, enjoying sport and food. You can spend some time outdoors, and see the colour of tree leaves turning from summery green to crimson, “autumn colour”. To enjoy that, because I live in the middle of Tokyo, I have to drive out to the mountain areas. So do most people in the area, anywhere famous for autumn leaves get busy. Cars, cars and more cars… All the roads get jammed on the weekend.

The most popular spot from Tokyo is “Nikko”. You can normally get there with a 3 hour drive each way. But this place is also famous for incredible traffic jams. I say, give it at least twice as much time. That means at least 6 hours to get there, so 12 hours return. I bet, now some of you are wondering if it is possible to enjoy the “autumn colour”.

Whatever the situation is, you have to be more careful with your driving than usual. A long time driving and big traffic jams are a dangerous combination to induce fatigue and sleepiness. So I would like to tell you what I normally do to reduce them.

Firstly, how to drive: Always check the speed limit and keep the engine revolutions steady to stop your eyes getting tired. You can also relax while driving and can guess other drivers’ speed, which reduces sore shoulders. This is also effective to get good gas mileage.

Secondly, when your eyes get “too tired” and you start feeling “drowsy”: Even if you try relaxing while driving as above, when you drive at night or to a new destination, you feel nervous. This causes your cardiac rate and blood pressure to get higher and makes you more tired as a result. It is because a substance called tryptophan causes some mental fatigue such as stress and nervous imbalance, which eventually causes your body to produce active oxygen. When this happens, the point is to reduce the tension of sympathetic nerves and easing the amount of active oxygen. This is what you can do:

(When your eyes are tired) … you will feel your eyes getting sore and your vision gets blurry as if your eye sight got worse. In this case, using your fingers, lightly press some acupressure points around your eyes. Do not press your eyeballs though.

(When your shoulders or other body parts are getting stiff) … stop at the next parking area if you are driving on a motorway. Park your car, get out and do some stretches. Stretch your Achilles' tendons, stretch higher with your arms up and bend & stretch your knees. Especially doing some exercises on the lower half of your body is good to get blood to circulate better which is also good to reduce your back pain.

(When you start feeling sleepy) … I am not really good with this one to be honest. About 20 years ago, I was working till 10 o’clock at night and went on a motorway. I had to drive in the middle of night and had two other senior employees from the same company as passengers. It was just when the sun light came up and I felt the brightness, I also felt drowsy; I hit the rail and scratched the side of the car badly. I was lucky it was just that but there was a possibility that it could have been worse. Since then, I have made it a rule that if I feel sleepy I will stop and have a rest; then go back on the road. To fight with sleepiness, I take some caffeine drinks to wake up my brain and vitamin B to ease fatigue. I normally take nutritious “Energy” drinks and canned coffee. Canned coffee contains both caffeine to keep you awake and sugar to boost your energy level and I think it works quite well. (It cannot be non-sugar black coffee. It has to have sugar to be effective.) When I go back behind the steering wheel, I chew gum to stimulate saliva production and the brain. I sometimes eat some snacks for a change. But you have to be careful with this one because a full stomach can also make you sleepy. I occasionally have a bath if I find a public one.

However the most effective solution is to ask my wife to drive. A few hours nap is usually all I need to get back into driving.

Please listen to your body and drive safely without getting overtired.


★ Japanese used car stock : http://jpctrade.com/stock/index.html
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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

How long is a car’s life?

Lately, I read in the newspaper that in Japan the average age since first registration of private vehicles (exclude small cars of 660cc displacement), at the end of March this year, is 7.23 years, which is 0.14 year longer than last year and the longest since the survey has started in 1975.

It has been getting longer year by year for 16 years since 1993 when the bubble economy burst. It means consumers are not buying new cars and sales have been in a slump for a while. Our cars are “aging” like the country’s population.

The average usage of cars from the year they are first registered to the year they are de-registered (which is a car’s “life expectancy”) is now 11.67 years, 0.01 year longer than last year and the longest in the last 3 years.

Some people have been saying for a long time that “new cars are not selling” and all data reported about cars are unfortunately backing it. Thinking positively, it means that people started using things more carefully and that cars are made to last longer; which is not too bad. However, it is a bad headache for us, car dealers and car manufacturers. Cars are now one of the things which you use till it breaks like TVs and fridges.

When you look at the average “life expectancy” of a car in the world, our neighbour Korea has the shortest with 6.6 years among the 13 countries surveyed and the longest was South Africa with 13.5 years, then 13 years in Netherland, 12.5 years in Greece and 12.3 years in New Zealand.

We have been exporting cars to Korea for a long time. One of our Korean customers said he would not be surprised that the average mileage per year is more than 20,000Km whereas it is 10,000Km in Japan. So the more you use cars, the shorter their life gets. It might be because Korean car manufacturers introduce new models every year and Koreans are urged to buy new ones at public auctions.

On the other hand, UAE in the Middle East has decided that cars more than 20 years old are not allowed to be registered after the year 2009 to reduce air pollution and traffic accidents. Also in 2010, it will be reduced to 15 years old and cars of 10 years and older cannot have ownership changed; and these things are already planned. For used car dealers, although it limits the cars we can export but at the same time it increases the demand for new cars. We do not know if it is a good or bad thing for us. At least it is good news for car manufacturers now that they can expect someone to buy new cars.

Do you think that your country might introduce the similar system like this one day?



★ Japanese used car stock : http://jpctrade.com/stock/index.html
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★ JPCTRADE Blog : http://jpctrade.blogspot.com/

(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

Car Polish

When I check cars at auction, I notice some cars have shiny bodies without faded colour and some totally covered with dust. At auction, the bidders are all professional so we do not bid less just because they are dusty; and the inspectors there have the same attitude. However, when I see a well polished car, it is true that I sometimes feel like raising our budget for it a bit more. Today, I would like to talk about car polish.

Some people love their cars so much that they wash them every weekend and polish them. When you see a well polished car, it looks good and water stays in balls on its body for a long time. On the other hand, a car without polish dries quickly because it does not repel water and water does not form balls. So if you want to “get rid of moisture on your car”, not polishing our cars seems better. Is car polish good for our cars?

Car polish is used to protect the paint from sun damage (especially from ultraviolet [UV] ray), dust, harmful substances in the air, salt, etc as well as from damages of water stains and car washes, pitches from asphalt and to slow the body’s degradation. So if you regularly polish your car, it will keep its shine.

There are two types of polish: ones made from natural materials such as plants and the other from chemical synthesis; but both are to coat cars for protection from “foreign enemies”. Polish is not permanent and because it is like a thin film, it peels off from frictions and sometimes melts away with high temperature. Polish totally melts away at a temperature of 60-70 degree Celsius. If it starts raining like cats & dogs, even if you spend all day applying it on your car, the polish easily peels off. Depending on the materials, some polish leaves water drops on cars and causes spotty stains called “water spots” while the water evaporates. Please note that car polish is very sensitive. To avoid these unwanted results, people tend to use polish of plant origin.

I do apply polish on cars very often because of my job, but it is actually not to protect them but to increase my exercise load. How about you?


★ Japanese used car stock : http://jpctrade.com/stock/index.html
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★ JPCTRADE Blog : http://jpctrade.blogspot.com/

(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

Which car to buy when the Japanese Yen gets stronger?

As you know, starting with the US subprime mortgage crisis, there was news of one of the largest investment banks in the US, Lehman Brothers’ collapsing and another of rescuing American International Group, Inc., an insurance company with taxpayers money; currently all share prices are rapidly dropping. It seems the same in Europe where financial institutions are in trouble and amid mounting concerns about the future of subprime investment, the stock markets are down probably for a long time and world investment funds are quickly being pulled out of the US and Europe.

In Japan too, our stock market keeps falling and it has started casting dark clouds over the performance of individual business. We, car traders, are hoping it will not bring an adverse knock-on effect going from one to another like from “bad business performance” to “reduction in wages and bonus” , to “decline in personal consumption” then to “not buying a car”.

However, although Japan’s economy is not looking good, the impact in the US & Europe is even bigger. Looking at the issue worldwide, Japan has relatively no effect from subprime lending and people started buying Japanese Yen as their investment outlet. As a result, Yen is getting stronger & stronger not reflecting the current financial situation of the country. Because we are in export, a high Yen means a “rise in price” for our customers and especially for people who usually buy the expensive range of cars from overseas, they will be making no profit at the current exchange rates and will want to wait until the Yen starts dropping.

Fortunately for us, this rapid increase in the value of our currency does not seem to have much effect on the numbers of cars ordered from overseas. From here, it is some juicy information only for our mail magazine readers.

There are cars which are not much effected by the exchange rates and they are popular at the moment. You might wonder “Are there any cars which price doesn’t get affected by a strong Yen?”. Well, there are cars you can get “cheap” at auction.

For example, say you bought a car at auction for JPY100,000 and the FOB price for it is JPY190,000. The freight will be US$1,000. The exchange rate went up by 10%, from JPY110 to JPY100 per US$1. From your side, it is a 10% rise in the FOB price. However, when you calculate the freight in Yen, US$1,000 was JPY110,000 before and now it is JPY100,000 with a 10% rise in the exchange rate; which is a 10% drop in the price you will have to pay for freight. So in such a case, it is a 10% rise in the FOB price but a 10% drop in the freight; although the rise in FOB is slightly bigger, as long as you can get a car at auction cheap, you can still bring it without too much difference in total price. This only applies when the FOB price is similar to the freight cost or lower, and when the FOB price is more than the freight, you need to buy a car cheaper at auction to make it worthwhile. (May not apply to all foreign currencies.)

So is it really possible to buy a car cheaper at the moment? From our experience, when the Yen gets stronger, importers get worried and stop buying cars for a while. This affects auctions and cars in the lower price range (around JPY200,000), which normally attract foreign bidders but due to the change in exchange rate there are less overseas buyers in the market. These cars have no market in Japan, so without importers bids, they have nowhere to go. This can be a chance for you! I am sure that if you keep bidding a few times, the chance of getting these cars cheap should increase. As I told you above, when the exchange rate does not affect the total price much, maybe you should try it now while no rivals are around.


★ Japanese used car stock : http://jpctrade.com/stock/index.html
★ JPCTRADE Home page : http://jpctrade.com/
★ JPCTRADE Blog : http://jpctrade.blogspot.com/

(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

Looking for a bargain? Now is the time!

30 September is halfway through the financial year. Because this day & 31 March are the days every business have to file a tax return, there are special things that happen. In business accounting, they close their account on the day by asking for payment for overdue invoices and calculate their expenditure. For relatively large companies which require an auditor, their bookkeepers and accountants struggle to decide what should be included in their reports. The major issues are sales & profit on the income statement and stock & debt payable on the balance sheet. All the records are then filed and have to be shown with explanation to the banks and shareholders, so finance control at this time is an important job.

Large car dealers have lots of cars in stock for their business activity. They have to have different types of cars in numbers, so they line as many used cars in a hot-selling line as possible. To collect good quality models, their purchasers go to auctions all the time. However, this time of year, to make their financial statements look good, they try hard to reduce their stock and lower their borrowings. It means that they try to get rid of old stock at auction to make cash to pay off part of their loan. So around this time, large dealers not only sell their stock but they are not purchasing a lot. If they win auctions on the last day of the financial period, the cars then will be shown as stock; they do not participate in auctions unless they have orders from customers. On the other hand, for dealers who want to get rid of their stock, this is the last day to do so and if they want to get rid of them badly, they do not worry about the price. This means for people who want to buy a car, their chances of getting a bargain come twice a year. Of course if you are in the business everyone knows this. As dealers are aware of what happens at this time of year, they do not sell cars that they expect to get a high margin on. So if you see a car you have been looking for, now is the time to buy it.

So I went to USS Yokohama today to get cars under their market prices. We had orders for a Cube, Hi-Ace, Skyline, Crown, Benz, BMW, etc. and we tried auctions in this order. However, bidders must have had a similar idea as us. Losing one to a slightly higher bidder, our bidding did not reach the reserve price, it was not looking promising. Then on the last car we had to bid, “Audi A6 3.2FSI Quatro 2006 Black”. Most of them in the market are models between 2003 and 2004 and price ranges from JPY2,400,000 to JPY2,600,000. Not many of the 2006 model have gone to auction and in the last 3 months there was one sold for JPY3,500,000. The client who had been looking for the car was originally targeting one in 2003/2004 because of his budget but wanted one with beige leather seats inside. We had been trying for a month but there was none with beige leather seats. They were all in black. Unfortunately this one also had black seats but it was a newer model and thinking it was a good chance of getting it cheaper, he decided to give up with the colour and set the maximum price as JPY3,000,000.

It was getting dark and we started bidding on our last car of the day. It started from JPY1,500,000 but went up to around JPY2,200,000 within a short time. Just when we thought it was the beginning of the real auction, we won it for JPY2,300,000! Because we were thinking it might go for around JPY3,000,000 considering its market price, getting it for JPY2,300,000 was totally out of the blue. Maybe the seller desperately wanted to get rid of it on the day and not many other bidders were around. I rang the customer to tell him about our success, he was very happy. He thought he might have used up all his luck for the year.

Although we knew it was a good opportunity, the auction is a fair system in which we cannot always get cars for the prices we set. But if you can get all the conditions right from the sellers’ intentions to lower numbers of bidders, you can take huge advantage. Actually, not only the last days of the financial half year but from about a week before the dates there are better chances of finding a bargain. So if you missed this time, please do not miss the next around: 31 March and the last week of that month.


★ Japanese used car stock : http://jpctrade.com/stock/index.html
★ JPCTRADE Home page : http://jpctrade.com/
★ JPCTRADE Blog : http://jpctrade.blogspot.com/

(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

Introducing a new pricing system!

In Japan, everything is getting more expensive every month because of high oil prices and food costs. In our business field, Toyota raised the price of hybrid cars like Prius & Harrier by 1 – 4.1% and commercial vehicles like Hi-Ace vans & Dyna trucks by 20% to cover the high cost of raw materials such as steel. Not only the car industry but large electric stores have decided to raise whiteware appliances like fridges & washing machines by around 7% from the same reason. Normal people like us do not buy durable goods like cars and fridges very often, so if we do, we do not rush to buy them, so it may not be much of an issue. (If you want to buy a car and buy a used car from JPC, the price rise of new vehicles will not affect you anyway.) However, we cannot say the same thing for food. High flour prices worldwide caused a rise in almost all kinds of food. The food items I love such as bread, ham & sausages, pasta, mayonnaise, cup noodles, snacks, etc. seem to keep getting dearer. They announced the rise only 2 months ago and you hear on TV that they are doing it again next month. I have 2 hungry children at home, so it hits our domestic finances heavily. When I went to our usual supermarket and found that sausages were on special, I bought 6 packets instead of the 2 I normally buy. When I got home, I counted 7 in each packet, not 8 as usual: I felt betrayed! I should have checked that before buying them on impulse… But I am sure I am not the only one having trouble with the recent rise in food costs. This is one of the issues at the latest Summit, so I guess it must be a worldwide problem at the moment.

Not following this trend, we at JPC introduce a new pricing system. At the moment, our handling charge (FOB charge) changes with the numbers of cars you purchase from us; now for some of you who buy 40 or more cars within a year, we will give you a bigger discount. If you buy 40 or more cars yearly from us, you can use our service from the minimum charge of JPY 55,000 including auction fees and export service fees. You might not think it is not going to be any benefit to you at the moment but some of our customers started from 1 car as a side business and are now importing far more than 40 cars a year. Buy more cars and enjoy the benefit of our discount.
For our fees, please check here: http://jpctrade.com/howtobuy/extracharge.html


★ Japanese used car stock : http://jpctrade.com/stock/index.html
★ JPCTRADE Home page : http://jpctrade.com/
★ JPCTRADE Blog : http://jpctrade.blogspot.com/

(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