Car Insurance, Loan, Purchase, Lease Decisions

Tips for Automotive Purchases

This Bankrate article has some useful tips to save money on buying a new or used car. Many are the standard tips such as considering buying a used car, weighing fuel costs and cleaning up your trade-in.

Another common tip the article mentions is to shop for the best loan deal before buying. The article recommends checking your local credit unions for the lowest rates. One credit union it doesn’t mention is Pentagon Federal Credit Union which currently has some very competitive auto loan rates. I last mentioned PenFed in my March post. Anyone can join this credit union by joining an association. For more information on joining, please see this Bank Deals PenFed post. To find local auto loan deals, the website BankingMyWay is a useful resource that is much better than what Bankrate.com provides.

Car Companies in China - A Summary

There has been a lot of talk lately about automobile manufacturers in China and their potential march to export in Europe and the US.  So I decided to do a quick summary of the various brands and manufacturers as a guide.

Chang’an Auto

Cherry

FAW (located in Changchun)

Dong Feng Group (located in Wuhan)
Geely (located in Taizhou)

Golden Dragon (located in Xiamen)

Huanghai (located in Liaoning province, currently developing SUV and light trucks)
King Long United Automotive Industry (located in Suzhou)
Then you have the joint ventures various manufacturers have in China

GM and VW have JVs in Shanghai

Toyota has a JV with FAW in Tianjin

BMW has a cooperation agreement and manufacturing with Brilliance Auto 
Ford and Honda have their own manufacturing plants in Guangzhou and Chongqing respectively.

To give you some idea about the scale of car sales in China, here are some statistics (from Xinhua agency):

• China car sales were at 1.54 million vehicles in Q1, 2007
• 1.12 million were sedans, while SUV were in the range of 71K vehicles
• The #1 spot is measured at 104.8K vehicles — sold by GM
• The #1 spot for single model was held by Santana - a VW model made in Shanghai.  (Keep in mind that the Santana is a tried and true model — When I first went to China in 1987 the Santana was already on the streets of Shanghai as a taxi cab vehicle)

As you can tell the automobile market in China is growing fast and is becoming a leading market worldwide.  How soon will the vehicles made in China find their way to the US market (they are already in Russia, Africa, Middle East) is tough to say, but that will happen.

Keep in mind also that the Geely and Cherry (Cherry makes the QQ) are in the range of US$4000 so they will definitely be striving to be a price leader soon enough.
    (two images  from  businessweek.com)

China Has Humvees Too (Sort of)

Well, in the past few postings I was focused on the decision making associated with buying a hybrid vehicle - tax incentives, HOV lanes, etc. Then as I was reading one of the China related sites over the weekend I came across a reference to an article on Tom.com

The article is about China’s new crazy vehicle — not to be left behind, China decided to invent its own big beast of a SUV — a copy of the Hummer. Here is an image:

Dong Feng HanMa — you can see for yourself — isn’t this a copy of a Hummer? The specs for the vehicle (according to Tom.com ) show a 8 cyl. AMG engine, 0-80 km/h acceleration of 17sec.; and the price tag is apparently 250K RMB (approx. US$35K). So, how about that? Ready to buy one… More images here

BMW Series-1: Have you seen one of these?

Well folks, I ended up getting the news for a new Series-1 BMW actually from a Chinese Web site.  NetEase at www.163.com, had the photos and a little blurb about the soon to be released Series-1 BMW.  It looks like the 3-series one but smaller.

The vehicle photos that I saw were of a 120d model.  Here are some images:

     This car reminds me of the time when BMW tried to introduce hatchbacks in the US.  The 318i (if I remember correctly) that lasted only one year…Now this seems to be the next push to extend market presence in the compact segment — I wonder how well they will compete with the Honda, Toyota, etc. compact cars.  This car though could be very successful in the status sensitive China — the notion of being able to say “I drive a BMW” (no matter how small it is) is a selling point by itself.  What do you think?