dm_irish said:
i'm seriously tempted by a 320d coupe after those road tax and vrt changes mark, going down from 30% to 16% vrt and tax of 150 a year! never thought I would be considering a bmw!
not going to affect you though as it is only new cars that are affected?
yeah, it won't affect me at the moment, however the concern I have is that if there is a significant VRT decrease in the new price my current car in July, then when I go to change my car in a year or two the second hand value will obviously be reduced by the same factor.
One of the examples the papers are giving is that a 1.25 litre Fiesta will go up in price by 500 euro, whereas a BMW 520d be 8000 euro cheaper due to its lower CO2 emissions.
Using that example, if I bought a 520d last January for 60,000 (instead of my A3), then come July the new price is 52,000, so any second hand 520ds will obviously come down in price by at least 8000. So I would lose an additional 8000 over and above the normal depreciation.
I think the new bands are a good idea in general, however by picking July 1st as the introduction date they've made a bit of a mess of things. Anybody looking to buy a new diesel car or any other car where the price is going to come down substantially is going to wait until July to buy it, so new car sales for the first half of the year will more than likely slow down, then come July people will be thinking that there's no point in only having a new car for half a year, so they'll wait until January 2009. Expect a lot of dealers to be offering heavy discounts in the next few months to try to shift some stock.
I would never previously have considered a BMW either, in fact I would have considered myself an Audi man for the forseeable future, however now that the new VRT and Road Tax system is in place, I'll have to do a bit of looking around before my next change to see what offers the best value for money. Although, in saying that, most of the manufacturers have been adjusting the pre-tax prices in Ireland (and other high VRT countries like Denmark) so that they are considerably lower than the pre-tax prices in the UK and Germany. I remember a report that came out a few years ago that showed the we had the lowest pre-tax price in Europe at the time. I would expect that the manufacturers will readjust their pre-tax prices so that they are at a comparable level against the competitors - in other words, if a given Audi was 2 grand cheaper than a comparable Merc or BMW before the shake-up, then it'll eventually be 2 grand or so cheaper after it all settle down.
