Weekly Dealer Car Enquiries: September 11, 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

There were 1,449 new car enquiries last week in the seven-day period ending Sunday, September 11, 2022. That represents a week-on-week decrease of 6.3% compared with the week ending Sunday, September 4, 2022, when 1,546 inbound car queries were received through the PriceMyCar platform.

As we foreshadowed in our last report, the Reserve Bank of Australia was on the verge of passing through its fifth consecutive interest rate hike, and its fourth increase of 50 basis points. It cannot be understated that with households already struggling amid a cost-of-living challenge, rising interest rates will only make things tougher, and there are more hikes still to come.

Given the volume of new cars that are purchased with finance, rising interest rates will continue to have an impact on new car buying interest. One of the clearest indicators of this so far was recent business and consumer confidence readings from the big banks. 

Whereas business confidence increased during August, owing to easing labour and purchasing costs that have underpinned robust profits, consumer sentiment is struggling. Data from CBA showed household spending intentions drifted lower last month, while the ANZ Roy-Morgan weekly consumer confidence index fell 0.5%, with the key gauge around 25% off the multi-decade average.

New car interest by brand

Despite the pull-back in new car buying interest across the board, a closer look at the numbers suggests the drop was largely aligned with a decrease in queries relating to BMW and Toyota vehicles. These two brands saw the sharpest fall in leads.

On the other hand, this year’s strongest performers, names like Kia, Ford, and Hyundai all saw a comparable level of interest as the week prior, while Isuzu, M.G., and Subaru even managed to grow the volume of quote requests versus the preceding week. 

Strong results among these brands were partly offset by a drop in activity for Mazda and Mitsubishi vehicles, however, the duo are still both sitting comfortably in the top five most sought-after brands.

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