Last weekend I conducted a search on the Mercedes Approved site. In the up to one year old E280Cdi category there were dozens of matches, and the prices certainly reflected the effect of reduced demand with lots of good spec models under 5k miles at around, or even under, £25k.
Mercedes have ?updated? their search interface this week (in the usual way of progress it?s fussier, clumsier and less easy to use than the one it replaced but that?s another matter.) Where has all the stock gone? Using the same criteria today it returned precisely two matches. I wondered if they?ve been alarmed at the damage to the brand which might be caused by such an obvious statement of declining car values.
Would they have implemented a disposal programme to palm cars to the traditional chosen few in order that the unaware may continue to enjoy the opportunity to pay top dollar for these rare and highly sought after motor cars?
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Unlikely that they disposed of cars to a chosen few. Those chosen few end up paying to run a car they probably don't want. So they'd sell it anyway, at an eye-catching price and the car values decline anyways.
Intriguing though, or maybe the new search engine has got it's relational database in a twist.....
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Probably sent to an abandoned airfield to wait for an upturn in prices:)
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Last weekend I conducted a search on the Mercedes Approved site
Obviously we cannot test last weeks data, but the results below are what I just got a few minutes ago.
Using this criteria [ <£25k, <10k miles, <1 year old (57 plate or later), national search ]
Note - 10k mile is the minimum I could input in the Mercedes Benz site search.
MB site found four 57 reg cars, of which two were under 5k miles, one in Nottingham and one at Lakeside.
Doing the same search on Autotrader, where you can input 5k miles as the limit, brings up just one car, which is in Nottingham.
Assuming that the dataset is accurate but very small, then the results are not significantly different.
This test indicates to me that the database contains very few models that meet the criteria, and the MB search engine produces one more hit than Autotrader for the specific input criteria used in this test.
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At 13.20 today there were 2 cars matching the criteria I used last weekend. (E280Cdi, Leather, auto, 2007 - 2008, =£25k, <=£30k.)
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Did it occur to anyone that as the cars were keenly priced that they sold them all?
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Perhaps they had an "Astonishingly Confident Auction" similar to the one to which BMW dealers were "invited" in June
www.honestjohn.co.uk/news/item.htm?id=4855
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Could have been. Maybe one of those "confident" Mercedes auctions (Colchester is the main venue) where cars which book £13k trade are now being knocked down for £9k there are just so many Mercedes knocking about in the trade.
Record for biggest drop though has to be 3 Volvo S80 V8's on 07 plate all under 5000 miles with every option. New? £45,000. CAP? £18000. Top bid out of the 3? £9400.
£35000 in 1 year 5000 miles. Wow. They didn't sell them but they'll just keep going round until they do.
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Probably exported somewhere else where they made a packet on them.
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Maybe but cars tend to find their natural prices. The new S80 is very weak in general and even the new V70 is not looking impressive.
The old V70 and S60 are still holding their own price wise (well, as much as any car is) in the right spec which rather proves the point Volvo drivers like their proper Volvos with proper Volvo seats and proper Volvo interiors.
Interestingly, Autocar this week made the point that the new XC60 seems to be more like the older V70 and S60 in design terms than the newer S40/80/V70 so maybe Volvo have reaslised where they went wrong.
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£6 a mile depreciation makes the fuel look cheap though :-)
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