AutomaticMan
Member
Don’t worry, it’s a good personal circumstances thing rather than a bad personal circumstances thing. Though I admit the shine is being rather taken off now I know how much I’ll lose on the car!Ouch.
I think it is supply and demand. The market is awash with 3 or 4 year old Model 3's which have all fallen off finance.
As someone who is looking to buy a M 3 it is not so bad news, but they have dragged down old M S prices with them (which makes sense as a 9 year old M S should not be worth more than a 4 year old M 3), but as my wife has an early M S then we have also been hit with the pain.
I see your pain and hope the bad personal circumstances resolve themselves.
Oh, I know. I knew it would be bad, I just didn’t know that it would be this bad! £695/month isn’t that bad and I wouldn’t be upset if that were my situation, but £1,500/month which is the lease equivalent for the depreciation I’ll get is upsetting.It's pretty simple to be honest, as said above.
- Cars started being delivered in mid/late 2019 and have only increased in volume (massively) since then. There's a steady supply of cars dropping off finance, and that will never stop. If anything it will just get "worse".
- Interest rates have jumped up, and people have less money to spend.
- Tesla have demonstrated that they're happy to drop new car prices by significant amounts on a whim. They have loads of margin across the cars (20%+ at least) so have plenty of room to keep dropping the price if they feel like they aren't shifting enough volume. This has a compressive effect on second hand car residuals, and means dealers and customers are skittish wondering whether the car they buy now is going to be worth £10k less in the space of a few months - as you've found out yourself.
I recently worked out how much my M3P has cost per month and it's about £695 (WBAC offering just over £31k as of this post), which I don't think is massively less than I was being quoted for finance back in 2020.
I planned to keep mine for at least 4 years when I bought it, but life circumstances that you hadn’t planned for can sometimes change things.I guess I’m one of the few that buy a car that I want and keep as long as possible without worrying about depreciation.
There’s front-loaded depreciation and there’s 50% depreciation in one year! If it were 30% in one year I’d have said “ah well, hey ho… car depreciation has returned to its normal pre-pandemic levels” and be disappointed but not shell-shocked. But 50% is horrific.People having bought new, or buying new now, are going to take a major bath though if they want or need to sell early on into ownership. To some extent that's normal because depreciation is heavily front loaded, but still painful nonetheless.
Also annoyed that I’ll now have to attempt a private sale. I’ve sold cars through Motorway.co.uk before and it is a nice, simple process. Looks like instead my next few months will be spent dealing with phone calls from time-wasters all day and trying to avoid being scammed.
Does anyone think used prices might recover slightly in a few months? My situation is that I need the car gone by September, but could also survive without it for a few months (use of another car) if it sold before that. Am I better off keeping hold of it a few more months so I get the benefit of its use, or should I sell as soon as possible before the used values get even worse? I appreciate that we’re in crystal ball mode here and no-one can know for sure… just trying to figure out my next move so speculation may be (slightly) better than nothing I guess!