Toyota New Zealand chairman Bob Field says that new vehicle prices in New Zealand are currently the lowest in the world but he cannot see them getting any lower in the future.
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Interviewed for the Independent News Ltd (INL) website stuff.co.nz, Field said that Kiwi buyers should not expect a drop in car prices despite a strengthening New Zealand dollar against the Japanese yen.
The Kiwi dollar bought 57 yen last week and dropped to a little over 55 yen yesterday, compared with just 42.50 in October 2000.
Field told INL that the weaker yen would take pressure off the motor industry which had been under a lot of “margin pressure” due to a weak New Zealand dollar for the past year.
“This is just making it a bit more comfortable,” he said. But the comfort was not likely to extend to reduced car prices. “I think the stronger dollar, and weaker yen won’t really change prices that much at all,” Field added.
However, INL said, the stronger dollar would postpone or eliminate price increases that would otherwise have been necessary.
Field told the website that New Zealand car prices would drop only if world prices dropped or if Kiwi buyers were willing to accept lower specifications, safety requirements, or less environmentally clean vehicles. “The answer to that is no-one will ever accept those,” he said.
Toyota, which has been the top-selling brand in New Zealand for most of the last 15 years, currently accounts for 18 per cent of total new car sales in New Zealand, where the main competition is not so much other new car brands but cheap used cars, imported mostly from Japan.
Nearly half of all new cars, 47 per cent, are sourced from Japan according to the INL report.
Field told the INL website that, as long as people asked for better specifications and governments asked for safer and cleaner cars, “the increase in technology will always cost more.”
“We are part of a global marketplace now because there are very few barriers to entry. I think we will continue to have the lowest vehicle prices in the world.”
