Car Shopping Part 2.

Last week I wrote about the test drive experiences I had whilst looking around for a new car. This week I'm going to talk a bit about the actual buying process itself.

For our car, we ended up doing a custom build. Our local dealer did an inventory search across the country for us, and all the red and blue cars were too far away to make any economic sense to have them shipped to us. Plus they had extra bits and pieces and packages we didn't want or need. I don't want black, white or grey (or silver) - there's enough monochrome cars over here already. So the best option, realistically was a custom order.

You have to be patient if you're going to do this, especially if you're ordering from overseas. However that doesn't mean there isn't wiggle room on the price. Most dealers will try to tell you that when you do a custom order, you're paying MSRP or you're not getting the car. View this as the opening gambit, not the final price. It can be hard if you're a bad negotiator - I'm not the best in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but hold your ground, be polite and firm, and you will get a better deal.

The best thing to do is research the actual prices before you go near a dealer. In the US we have sites like TrueCar.com - it's been a while since I looked in Europe but I suspect the same sort of sites are available there. With a price site like this, you choose the car you're interested in and add on all the options you want - paint colours, interior and exterior options - everything. It will then tell you what the actual dealer invoice is (rather than the one the dealer will show you), as well as any current incentives to the dealers for selling the vehicle. The incentives are typically unpublished bonuses paid to the dealers for selling particular vehicles. In addition, it will tell you what the holdback is (the amount the dealer gets paid by the manufacturer no matter what price you get the car for) and in most cases you will be able to see what other people in your area paid for the car you've specified.

Use this information - print it out and take it to the dealer with you. Don't throw it in their face, but refer to it when you start talking price. Again - be firm and polite. If you're arrogant ("Don't be stupid - I know exactly what this car should cost!") then you will be paying MSRP and that's all there is to it. In most cases, that attitude will get you a hefty add-on too - you might end up paying full sticker price.

What you have to do is find the balance between how much you think the dealer wants to make, and how much they think they want to make. You'll almost never get them to bottom-dollar but 9 times out of 10, you can get the price to come down. In my case, after a little negotiation, our custom build came down to $1,700 below MSRP. That's a nice deal for me, the dealership still makes good money off me, and everyone's happy.

Be cautious of hidden add-ons though. For example my dealer told me there'd be an additional $1,350 for a ClearBra that they "put on every vehicle as standard". I'm having a custom-built vehicle, so I told them that I don't want that put on my car. It's being built for me, not for the dealership, so they can't force that on me. Look out for other things like that - paint protection packages, upholstery protection packages - these are all high profit-margin items that the dealers will use to try to increase their bottom line and don't be fooled into thinking they're worth anything; if you ever try to claim, they'll fight you the whole way and the normal outcome is a lot of angst for no payout.

The same is true for non-factory-backed warranties. They really are not worth the paper they're written on. The aftermarket warranty companies are extremely clever at getting out of claims no matter how small. The only extended warranty that counts is a manufacturer-extended warranty (not a dealer-extended warranty).

Again - be firm and polite when it comes to the upsell, and you will get your way most time. The people you're talking to are humans just like you, with families to go home to. Treat them with respect and they'll remember you. Treat them like an ass and you'll pay for it forever.

Car shopping.

I was in the fortunate position recently to be new-car shopping. This time around I decided to go a bit more up-market than everything I've owned in recent history. It was a long list to start with but in the end it boiled down to these four vehicles : Audi Q5, BMW X1, Mercedes GLK and Range Rover Evoque.

I was able to test drive all the vehicles within a few days of each other so I was able to make a fairly good comparison between them. The most disappointing of all was the Mercedes. It was smaller inside than my VW Tiguan, the controls were extremely peculiar in their layout and it really didn't drive very well. The 3.0 V6 was perky enough, but the whole package felt a bit numb.

The BMW X1 was ruled out almost before the test drive. It too was small inside - so small that with the seat in a good driving position for me, I wouldn't be able to carry any passengers in the back, and I regularly have three or four people in my car. On top of that, the plastics they've used inside felt cheap and hard and scratchy, and the centre console layout was very 1980's. Plus it had that awful iDrive computer. The drive wasn't much better. Vague steering, vague throttle response, vague brakes. Not at all what I was expecting from BMW.

The Audi rose to the top of the pile simply by virtue of not being eliminated. The drive was lovely, the layout inside was very familiar because of my ownership of the VW Tiguan. Everything was just-so. The steering had the same unusual electro-mechanical feel to it as my VW (which I'm used to) but it was nowhere near as disconnected from the wheels as the Mercedes or the BMW. In all it's a brilliant car, even if I'm not sold on the jelly-mould shape of the exterior.

Finally, the Range Rover Evoque had a drive that, for me, belied its size. It's more nimble than any of the others (in so far as any crossover can be 'nimble'), the interior was a bloody nice place to be, and the steering, brakes and throttle were all quite similar in overall feel to my VW, and the Audi. Not great, but not wooden. The big downside is the tiny slit that masquerades as a rear window, but I was willing to overlook that for two reasons. First, all US-spec Evoques come with a backup camera as standard, and second, my second ever car was an Audi Quattro that had a similarly tiny rear view when looked at in the mirrors. That's to say - I'm used to it.

The Audi is certainly the pick of the bunch if I was to pick with my head. But I've done that for so many cars now that I decided to throw caution to the wind and pick the Evoque with my heart instead. Time will tell if this was a wise choice, or if it's going to be something I'll look back on as "one of life's rich experiences".

The mpg question: why is diesel so unpopular in the US?

A few weeks back I talked about a VW Golf that we rented whilst on a trip to the UK. It returned an impressive 88mpg - about 73mpg in US gallons. That's a car you can own and drive today - not some fly-by-night fantasy or future concept. Yes, it's a diesel, yes it has VW's package of fuel economy add-ons (low-resistance tyres, streamlined underbody, stop/start etc) but it's all entirely usable technology right now.

Meanwhile, here in the colonies, we struggle to get 40mpg out of a passenger car and 25mpg out of an SUV is a total miracle. I'm talking about real-world figures here, not the rose-tinted view of the world that the EPA live in where nobody drives in the cold, or up and down hills, or in traffic, or at night, or above 57mph. Heck if you drove that Golf at 57mph with all the electrical items turned off I reckon it would top 80mpg U.S.

I've never really understood why America hasn't taken to diesels. My best guess is that the US-built diesels of the 80's are probably what put most consumers off. Rattly, dirty, noisy beasts that sounded like a 1950's train. But modern diesels are so much better. With the soot and particulate filters and all the other technologies in the engine, they get stellar mpg numbers and in most cases (if you use low-sulphur diesel) are now cleaner than petrol cars for the same engine size. VW knows this - it's why they have the broadest range of diesels of any manufacturer selling cars in the US. Jeep seem to be catching on now - they're going to offer a diesel engine in their range this coming year, but I suspect the old biases will be tough to get past and I don't think diesels will ever really be as popular here as they are in Europe.

The bizarre thing is, of course, that now diesel is so expensive in Europe, people are starting to swing back the other way to hyper efficient petrol-engined cars. Small turbo engines with direct-injection technology are as driveable as any petrol engine you're used to but return diesel-like gas-mileage numbers. Yet again, even with that technology around right now, we still struggle here in the US.

Is it consumer apathy or lack of demand? Is it the low petrol prices? Or is it that vehicle tax over here is still based on the value of the vehicle (in most states) instead of the exhaust emissions? I guarantee if that changed, people would be begging and screaming for properly fuel-efficient engines in their cars....

Self driving cars, again

Another week, another study.

The latest study into self-driving cars has stated that "The thought is that autonomous cars will reduce the number of traffic deaths — more than 100 people per day, currently". Marketing doublespeak might make you think that they mean self-driving cars would save 100 lives per day. Actually, what it means is that currently 100 people a day are killed in car accidents, and that that number might be reduced, but they don't guesstimate by how much.

In truth the same could easily be achieved much more effectively by proper driver training and annual re-assessment. We don't license airline pilots and train drivers once and then leave them to it - they get annual or bi-annual re-assessments. They're human just like you and me, yet in America we're allowed to take an open-book written test in some states, and shockingly, people still fail even when they're given the answers. That's followed by 8 minutes of the dumbest driving test in the history of the universe and then no re-testing until we're dead.

The key phrase in that study was "the thought is". We thought the earth was flat at one point too, and millions of people think American Idol is important (hint: it's not).

In America, we have an appallingly easy mechanism of getting untalented, unprepared drivers on to the road, reflected in the accident rate here. 8.5 fatalities per billion road kilometres driven (a good metric - it takes into account population, number of cars, number of drivers and distances driven). In Sweden, where the driver licensing mechanism can take a year, that number is 5.1. In the UK where driver training takes months and the test is phased, it's 5.7. In fact, the only places in the world with a higher fatality rate than the US are places like Latvia, Estonia and Slovakia (Source).

So trying to sell the idea that automated cars will somehow "fix" the accident rate in the US ignores that fact that the driver licensing mechanism is totally broken. Fix that and the accident rate will drop naturally. It's a lot cheaper and doesn't require the wholesale replacement of every vehicle on the road.

That's a serious point - unless every car on the road has this technology, it simply won't work. Say you're in a self-driving car and it sees something and performs an emergency stop. I'm behind you in a normal car and I can't react anything like as quick as your computer. I slam into the back of you with enough speed that my airbags deploy and I shunt your car forwards into whatever it was trying to avoid. That's a very common accident right now and there's nothing your self-driving car can do to prevent that accident.

That assumes the tech works in the first place. Case in point: Volvo's new auto-braking system - exactly what I just described above.



It failed spectacularly at this press event because of "battery issues". Mercedes have problems too. The UK TV Show 'Fifth Gear' recently tested their auto emergency braking system and in every instance (slow, 18mph, 28mph and 60mph) it hit the car in front. Sure they can iron out the bugs - I'm not a total luddite - but ultimately, demonstrations like this prove that even when everything ought to have be set up perfectly, it can still go wrong. And that's my point - if you can't rely on this technology 100% of the time, it shouldn't be being put into cars. Heck - ABS has been around for decades and that still has problems (gravel, snow, ice, mud etc). The last generation Ford Mustang had ABS that would fail when it was raining - the one time you might actually need it.

Look at Google's self-driving cars - loaded up with sensors, cameras, radars, lasers and computers yet they can't merge on and off motorways (they can't figure out speed differences and sizes of prospective gaps for the car) and they can't drive any route that hasn't been pre-driven and stored in GPS. So they're not really autonomous at all - they're simply playing back pre-driven routes.

There's dozens if not hundreds of other examples where this technology, impressive as it is, simply isn't working.

Parallel parking a car is about the easiest thing you can do - it's a low speed geometrically simple problem and you ought to be able to do it pretty much in your sleep. Yet they haven't been able to make a car that can do that reliably. The ones that attempt it have a manual an inch thick telling you all the things you need to do to "prepare" the car for the maneuver and even then it'll fail 6 times out of 10. Do you really want to rely on a car to save you, to think for you, to make decisions for you? When they can't even make a car that can reliably parallel park, I don't.

Safer cars mean worse drivers

If you've read my blog for any length of time you might remember that I subscribe to the theory that safer cars make for worse drivers. My argument all along has been that when you seal people into a quiet cocoon full of entertainment gear, surrounded by safety aids, the drivers begin to assume that the car will save them from their own bad driving. (most recently, see the Driver Education and Toyota Wants To Steer For You posts)

It seems that my theory on this actually has some substance. New research suggests just that - extra safety equipment in cars gives drivers a false sense of security and leads to them taking more risks.

The TRL (Transport Research Laboratory) in England studied crash statistics from 2000 to 2010 and statistical models were developed to look at casualty trends and the effects of car secondary safety improvements. They discovered that, while the number of people seriously injured in road accidents dropped for the first six years of that period, the number of fatalities barely changed. Bear in mind that during the same period there were great improvements in car safety levels with the introduction of more airbags and standard ABS, stability control and traction control on most cars. On higher-end vehicles, things like preemptive braking, radar-assisted cruise control and lane departure warning systems were also becoming commonplace. That all resulted in an increasing number of cars being awarded a five-star crash test safety rating by Euro NCAP.

These advances should have cut fatality rates, but the report's authors warn increasing safety levels may have been counter-productive:

"The reason that the fatality trend was not decreasing up to 2006... may be due to driver confidence – additional safety features in and on vehicles provide additional confidence and some drivers may have adapted their behaviour (ie drive more recklessly) as a result."

The report does go on to say that after 2006, fatalities dropped although the analysis shows that this is most likely because the economic downturn which appears to have had a beneficial effect on driver behaviour, with less speeding and drink driving. The decrease in overall traffic also contributed, especially the large reduction in HGV traffic, and a fall in the number of young male drivers.

The report is available on the TRL website for a small fee.

The TRL are not the first large study institute to come to this conclusion; the American Institute for Highway Safety published similar findings last year - you can read about those in this blog post.

This all begs the question then : why do manufacturers keep loading cars up with this stuff if it's now being proven to be of little or no use? Surely they should be removing this stuff, simplifying and lightening cars and improving fuel economy and safety as a result? Frankly, the more a driver is involved in the act of driving, the safer the roads become because concentration levels have to be higher. That's why drivers who started out on motorbikes are statistically safer car drivers, and that's why cars with manual gearboxes are involved in less accidents - motorcyclists and drivers of manual cars are both more involved in the act of driving (or riding).