06/11/2021
If you need to change your car shortly here’s why you shouldn’t hang around
Prices are going up as there’s more demand than supply
"We have seen used car prices rise by nearly 25% so far in 2021, this is something that we have never seen before in the UK. New car sales are going to be around 650,000 units below the volume sold in 2019 (Pre-Pandemic), this has a massive impact on the number of used cars entering the marketplace. Daily rental companies like Hertz and Enterprise usually buy tens of thousands of new cars every year and de-fleet them every 6/9 months which creates masses of late low mileage cars that are sold on dealers' forecourts. With the raw material shortages that manufacturers are experiencing they have been selling far less vehicles to the rental sector.
The same shortage of raw materials means that the lead time for a new car is anywhere between 3 and 6 months, many of these customers are subsequently moving to nearly new vehicles. As a result, we have a perfect storm with demand far outstripping supply. The used car shortage is likely to continue for some time yet, certainly for the first half of 2022. It will take a drop in demand caused by an issue with the economy that stops spending, or an increase in the number of new vehicles entering the marketplace to rebalance the supply.
On the positive side -if you’ve a car to sell it could be worth more than you think
