Prices and attitudes changing as car market comes under scrutiny

I DO not dispute the importance of allowing the consumer to haveas much information to hand as possible when he or she enters ashowroom and looks at a car.

However I would take issue with the integrity of the telephonesurvey conducted by What Car?

There are many different facets to buying a car and it actuallyhas very little to do with the price that is displayed on thewindscreen.

Depending on the value of a car you might have to trade in andwhether or not you are looking for finance, the price of a vehiclecan vary dramatically from customer to customer.

Like the price of anything these days, the apparent cost of a caris not as simple as it looks.

I believe we have become a nation of hagglers in this country andit has been quite a dramatic shift from our previous non-hagglerstatus. It has taken quite a long time to achieve, but we query theprice of large consumer products with startling regularity.

No-one would consider paying the price on the ticket of a largepiece of furniture and we are quite comfortable with using ourlawyers to haggle over the price of property, so I suppose it wasjust a matter of time until the sale of cars came in for the sametreatment.

Of course this has always happened to some degree, but in thelast two years, customers are more confident than ever before.

The internet has been a very interesting feature of the newhaggler status of our customers.

People come in waving statistics that they have printed off andwhether these are entirely relevant or not, they give the customerconfidence to strike up a conversation with a car dealer from aposition of relative strength and that is much more positive for thesalesman as well, believe it or not.

We want customers to come in and challenge the salesman; it is afar better thing that they do that, than if they come in, keen onbuying a car, but deeply suspicious of every remark the salesmanmakes.

The trick is being able to strike a deal that suits both parties,taking into account the worth of the old car if there is one, theprice of the new car and whether financing the deal is part of thepackage or not.

All of these issues have an influence on what is finally paid andso does dealing with the salesman face-to-face.

I firmly believe that building up a good working relationshipwith the car salesman is also part of a good deal. Of course hewants to sell a car at his best price and you want to buy a car atyour best price, but salesmen never underestimate the importance ofdoing business with someone who is going to recommend the dealershipto his friends - or indeed, come back again three years later whenit is time to update the model.

The last 18 months have been revolutionary for the car market -manufacturers, dealerships and consumers alike.

The Competition Commission gave Stephen Byers the reasons heneeded to cut GBP 1,000 from the price of all new cars sold from 1September, 2000.

The major manufacturers got the message and began to slash theirown prices. Showing they can do this has only whetted the public'sappetite for even more cuts.

The signs are that it is not over yet. Pressure is mounting onEurope to rule on the pricing policies of manufacturers and pricescan only continue to go down.

What Car? is another welcome tool for the consumer.

However the target prices for models it lists within its coversare far from the end of the story.

Alan Pulham is the franchise dealer director of the Retail MotorIndustry Federation (RMI), which represents car dealerships acrossthe country.