Car Buying NZ Style

Once we found somewhere to live, our next priority was finding a car, and after driving around these crazy narrow streets for the last week, we both agreed that smaller was better. Back to our old friend Trade Me again to get a sense for the market and figure out all these new car brands that we'd never come across before. As an auction driven site similar to eBay, many of the listings show two prices - a no haggle 'buy it now' price and an auction price and end date. We started online, then headed out to visit a few different places. 

Cars in NZ are split into two major types right off the bat - "NZ New" and "Imports". As you might have guessed, NZ New cars are those that were imported here as brand new cars and have stayed registered in NZ. Imports were originally sold overseas (Usually Japan) then imported to NZ and registered. The big difference is NZ New cars have a verifiable track record in the country, while Imports are a little more variable, but also cheaper. A lot of dealers provide warranties or guarantee odometer readings but often there are still little quirks with imports. For example, a lot of times the radio will be super fancy in a reasonably old car, but everything will be written in Japanese. In some of the newer cars with electronic odometer and information panels integrated as part of the car itself, you will see the messages in Japanese. Unfortunately the Japanese characters for "Check Engine" or "Oil Change Due" are equally indecipherable to me. 

  

We started off visiting an auction house in Lower Hutt because they had a lot of listings on Trade Me. They have auctions on Wednesdays and Thursdays and their auction house also sells a lot of 'buy now' cars you can just jump in and drive around the yard. Unlike in the US, you are basically left to your own devices. There is no car dealer following you around chatting you up and trying to pressure you into anything. There are people there to answer your questions, but they pretty much leave you alone unless you need them. 

There also seem to be a good number of smaller dealers who have a handful of inventory that you can make an appointment with. We visited one guy we found on Trade Me who basically sells cars from his house - he has them dotted all around the streets surrounding his flat (and now the random parking we see everywhere makes a bit more sense). Then we found another guy who specializes in little imports and works out of a big garage in an industrial park. Somehow he managed to cram about 20 cars in one unit with barely enough room to walk between them. Basically you decide which cars you want to test drive and then he plays car Tetris moving about 10 different cars to get to the one you wanted.

The other random thing about test driving cars is no one asks for your license or any kind of identifiable info before slapping a dealer plate on the back of the car and handing you the keys while they stay behind moving cars to get to the next one you want. I thought this was another crazy example of Kiwi trust and openness, which it is, except after driving a dozen or so cars now I also realize all of them have zero gas. Which basically means if you wanted to run off with them, you'd only get a mile or so away before you broke down. Brilliant. 

Well we finally found 'the one' - after flirting with a Ford Fiesta, a Mitsubishi Colt Plus, a Toyota Corolla and a VW Golf, we settled on a Mazda Axela (Mazda 3 to us in the States). Its a 2005 but looks brand new, reasonable mileage and, of course an awesome Japanese GPS system that will helpfully navigate us around Tokyo, but sadly not Wellington...

 If the process of test driving cars was ridiculously easy, the process of buying one was even easier. After we took it for a spin and decided to pull the trigger, we went inside handed over our US driver licence, then a runner literally ran across the road to the VTNZ with our license and the signed one page sales agreement and came back less than 10 minutes later with our new NZ license plates. Paying was also a lesson in trust -  most debit cards here have a $5,000 daily limit on them for purchases unless you call the bank and change it, so the guy just charged us $4,000 on the spot (at his suggestion, in case we wanted to make additional purchases that day!) and then he basically handed us an IOU form with the balance written out and their bank account details. He was like just transfer the rest of the funds over today or tomorrow, whatever works... The dealers insurance covers us until we get home, so in about 27 minutes we were driving out the gate with our new car.

I freaking love this country!