What’s Your Car’s Re-sale Value?

A black Volks Wagen

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A key factor in overall transportation cost is the re-sale value of your vehicle. But while many consumers research the prices of new vehicles to the nth degree, they often don’t even take a stab at finding out how that used vehicle’s value over time. But now a new online tool will make obtaining that information easier. The J.D. Power Consumer Center, a Web site that provides voice-of-the-customer ratings on a number of products and services, has introduced a new feature on its automotive site called PIN Retained Value. Read more . . .

Payment Driven Car Lease

Not all vehicles are created equal, and that goes double when it comes to re-sale value, a key component in determining automotive lease rates. Because of this phenomenon, monthly lease payments for some expensive vehicles can actually be less than those for lower-priced vehicles.   But tracking down these “deals” was a hit-and-miss proposition until now.   Recently, Automobile Consumer Services (ACS), a leader in online, direct-to-consumer auto leasing, has added a new service to its popular leasing services. Read more . . .

Your Car In The Future?

In the late 1950s a cover of a leading do-it-yourself magazine pictured helicopter-like flying cars and predicted we’d all be driving one by the year 2000. Ten years later a similar magazine suggested that we’d all have cars with turbine engines under the hood that could run on salad oil or kerosene as easily as on gasoline. By the 1980s those supposedly in the know predicted that technology would conquer the problems associated with the electric car. New batteries, they said, would finally take electrics out of the horse-and-buggy era and make them viable. Read more . . .

How Is The Car-Buying Process Changing?

A Nouvelle Peugeot

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How will you buy your next vehicle?Will you click on an online buying service, gather some information and then fill out a computer form to make your purchase? Or will you make the more traditional trek from dealership to dealership parrying with car salespeople before making your purchase? Or will your experience be some combination of these two extremes?

One thing is certain: the business of selling vehicles is changing minute-by-minute, but just what the process will morph into no one, not even the purported experts, Read more . . .

Dealer Invoice Pricing–Tricky

One of the unique aspects of the auto industry is that you can find out, virtually to the penny, what the retailer paid for the product he or she is about to sell you. Just try to find out what Sears paid for the Frigidaire refrigerator you’re about to buy. Or make an attempt to discover what Circuit City paid for the high-definition Sony TV you’re looking at so longingly. You will find the going tough, if not impossible.

But when it comes to the auto industry, if you have access to the Web, and one presumes you must since you’re reading this, then you have almost instant access to sources of so-called “dealer invoice pricing.” The dealer invoice is, of course, the price the dealer pays Read more . . .