Australia’s Best New Car News, Reviews and Buying Advice
Like a slow motion replay, the scene has been unfolding for some time. In fact, go back a couple of years and the writing was on the wall. Australians are obsessed with SUVs. But it’s not just here either, with many other countries following the trend, none more evident than the United States and China.
It has reached the point now where local SUV sales are far and away outperforming sedans, and have blown past 50% of all new car sales. On the one hand, the rise of commercial vehicles like utes has also helped to skew the numbers away from sedans, but the prominence of the SUV category is no statistical anomaly.
There are still a reasonable number of new cars being sold in Australia, when you can get them! For the second year running, new car sales figures have been heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. While the 2020 lockdowns stopped production and prevented sales, in 2021 it was really the global supply chain problems that caused the biggest headaches for ensuring manufacturers had all the bits to make up an entire car to sell. Most notably, it was the availability of semiconductors that caused the greatest complications, even to the point where all car manufacturers – it didn’t matter what brand – had to halt their production lines at various times.
Stumping up a deposit for a new vehicle can be a difficult prospect for many new car buyers, yet alone if they are trying to scrape together enough funds for it to be a large deposit.
So does it really matter then if you are unable to put down a large deposit for a new car? Should you hold off on your decision to purchase a car until you are in a position where you have enough funds for a large deposit?
The flourish of new electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrids on the auto markets hint towards the diminishing of fossil fuel use. EV sales have a long, long way to go before outselling vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICEs), but the goals have been set by international emission standard agreements. Certainly, doing away with EV range anxiety, the liquid lithium-ion batteries proneness to catching fire, having EVs with brief recharging times that are in line with current ICE refuelling times, and have pricing parity between a new EV and an equivalent new ICE vehicle would make a world of difference in the minds of people on the lookout for a new car. Once these EV problems have been solved, perhaps consumers will genuinely buy into an all-EV future.
Level 2, 9 Help Street
Chatswood NSW 2067
© 1999 - 2024 Private Fleet
ABN: 70 080 056 408, Lic: MD19913.
All Rights Reserved
Tweet
