So, you’ve been eyeing that new ride at the showroom for awhile now. You’ve read about it, test driven it and introduced it to your Chief Financial Officer (aka Wife) who has nodded her approval. What’s left to do but sign on the sales agreement? Then you hit the brakes when the salesperson gives you his ‘best’ offer for your old car. You think to yourself that your old faithful can fetch a better price than that. You might just be right.

In this article, we will explore the ways to get a better trade-in value for your old car without shady dealings with secondhand car dealers or falling victim to unscrupulous car salesmen.

Last December when the economy started crumbling, repercussions were felt throughout the world’s different industries. One of the hardest hit was the car trade. Consumers were afraid to invest in a new set of wheels fearing the sudden loss of their jobs due to severe cost cutting by large corporations. Nobody was buying cars and car malls all over Singapore that are usually packed on weekends were doing convincing impressions of a ghostown.

Due to the lack of demand for secondhand cars, dealers were offering ridiculously low prices for trade-in cars which led to a self-perpetuating problem. Consumers were unable to let go of their old cars without suffering a huge financial loss and thus unwilling to purchase new cars. LTA’s recent efforts to resuscitate the used car market by reducing the number of COEs available has helped raise used car sales slightly. Thus improving trade-in prices for motorists but is it enough?

Undercover

To find out which showrooms offers the best trade-in amount, this journalist visited several showrooms posing as a potential customer shopping for a new set of wheels for Mum. Were the theatrics necessary? Well as much as it grates on my conscience to pose as a potential customer (having been a car salesman myself), it was necessary to ensure the best trade-in price that any man on the street would get and not an inflated quotation for a motoring journalist.

The car being used for this test is a pristine three year old Toyota Altis 1.6-litre with about 40,000km on the odometer. A brand new one would fetch about $67,000 but let’s see what we can get for our used car.

To ensure I covered as wide a demographic as possible, I visited showrooms for luxury models as well as mainstream ones. After going through several rounds of sales talk, the salesperson gave me the trade-in value for my Toyota.

Here are the values I got from the different dealers:

Who?	What car?	How much?	Overtrade?	Overtrade amount?	Handover date
BMW	318i	$33,000 -$35,000	No	Nil	Dec '09
Mercedes Benz	C180 Blue- efficiency	$37,000	Yes	$3,000	Jan '10
Honda	Civic 1.8-litre	$36,000	No	Nil	Dec '09
Chevrolet	Cruze 2.0-litre	$30,000	No	Nil	Jan '10
Nissan	Sylphy 2.0-Litre	$37,000	No	Nil	Dec '09
Quotz	-	$40,000	No	Nil	Nov '09