Quote:
Originally Posted by darkside
as for the comment about toyotas,the hilux hasnt been changed in nearly 8 yrs....prolly out back of factory facelifting yur 5yr old trade in and reselling it  ..certainly know how to make a buck them asian fellas......doc |
I don't have a problem with the Hilux not changing. If the design works why change it? Otherwise it's just change for change sake. A marketing scam to make people buy the fancy new model when in reality the old one was just as good for it's intended purpose.
This is one of the things thing that annoys me about the car industry. They have a redesign every couple of years and make a whole new car. While it might be nice to see a completely new looking Commodore it really f#cks the value of 2nd hand cars.
For a car I would buy myself I prefer the ones that have longer runs of the same model with just evolutionary changes. The Europeans were pretty good at this for a long time and I think that's part of the reason a lot hold their value better than the local equivalents. That seems to be changing now as they adopt this new marketing model so not to be left behind in the money grab.
To me it makes more sense for manufacturers to get as much life out of the tooling they can. The industry has made a rod for it's own back with this constant change for change sake marketing model. These major redesigns cost a lot in R&D and then retooling the lines. Costs that need to be born by the folks buying the cars so the price goes up. Since the customers won't take too much of this there is pressure to reduce costs by moving production to countries with cheap labour.
I hate this current throw away mentality that has gotten into everything we buy. It's driven by the marketing departments of companies that make stuff because they want to sell you more sh!t you don't need.
Your average consumer needs to take a good look at themselves. There's the idea that once a car hits 100,000KM and is out of warranty it's worn out "Got to get rid of it, it's costing me too much money!". What a bunch of sh!t. If they added up the real cost it'd be a hell of a lot cheaper to keep that older car on the road. Think of the depreciation hit you take on selling the old car and then fronting up the extra cash for the new and improved one. All so you can have the latest and greatest.
"But think of the money I'll save! The new one does 10L/100 when the old one used 11L/100" they cry. Never mind you just blew $30K in the change over. I'll try to put that into perspective...
$1.50L for reg unleaded.
10L/100KM = $15 per 100KM
$15,000/100,000KM
11L/100 =$16.50 per 100KM
$16.500/100,000KM
$1500 per 100,000KM better off. That means you need to drive about a million KM before you are in front of the $30K dropped in the change over. Given the average punter seems to reckons a car is worn out by 100,000KM. Well....
End of rant.
