Weekly Dealer Car Enquiries: October 30, 2022

In this series, which we aim to bring to you every week, we’ll be detailing some of the key numbers and trends that we’re seeing in terms of dealer connections made through our site.

As this data is considered somewhat representative of broader industry activity, and serves as one of the more insightful leading indicators for potential car sales, we hope it will fulfil a few purposes for our broad audience. First, to document not just how we’re performing as a business, but how dealers and the wider market stand to perform, so you don’t have to wait til that next set of official sales data.

Without further ado, here’s what happened over the last week.

Total new car enquiries

Following a huge jump in new car buying interest in the week ending Sunday, October 23, the total number of dealer connections encountered a steep decline last week, with the result more in keeping with the long-term trend of the last 18 months.

Across the PriceMyCar platform, 1,248 quote requests were submitted, which is down over 40% week-on-week. While we were expecting the total volume of queries to moderate, the significant pull-back is also a reflection of last week’s key event - the federal budget.

It is likely that new car buyers were left disappointed by the budget, particularly news that power and gas bills are set to soar over the next 12 months. Those expenses would no doubt be front and centre in the minds of those considering buying a new car, let alone the fact that the government also signalled a weak macroeconomic outlook in terms of wages growth and inflation.

New car interest by brand

It won’t come as any shock that there were declines right across the board last week as new car buyers indiscriminately pared back their interest.

The largest pull-backs were among those at the top of the charts, which follows the preceding week’s result where these names largely soared higher.

With Mitsubishi falling out of the top five, that provided scope for the market’s best-selling brand to feature among the brands with the most quote requests. Normally, the Japanese auto-maker is a little further down the list on account of its well-known status, which typically means that most new car buyers already have an idea of what they might be paying for a new Toyota.

Perhaps surprisingly, the only car brands that recorded any sort of positive growth last week were the two companies that have pivoted to fixed-price agency models in Australia - Honda and Mercedes-Benz.

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