Sticker prices on bikes in dealers have reached ridiculous heights that have little relevance to what the machines go out of the door for. A friend recently paid £2350 in used fifties for a one year old GPz305 from a Bristol dealer. To get that price he had to wave the money under the salesman’s nose, threaten to walk out several times and shove a copy of MCN’s Bikemart into his face to show where he could buy a new GPz for £2750!
His original offer of £2200 was greeted with howls of disbelief, laughter and not a little anger (I was hanging around in the background). The sticker price was a thoroughly absurd £3275; an insult that made me want to walk out in disgust if not firebomb the place. The dealer’s spiel was the usual stuff about an excess of punters desperate for anything half decent and that machines were practically walking out of the showroom (the GPz had actually been hanging around for about six months!)
Anyway, blows were avoided and my friend happily accepted the fact that for the price he wasn’t going to get any kind of guarantee and that the salesman was never going to be his best friend. The dealer scowled, cursed and generally behaved like a third world politician deprived of a bribe. Luckily, the little Kawasaki ran like a Swiss watch and had insufficient mileage on its clock to worry about its cylinder head going down (frequent oil changes and gentle warming from cold can make it last for a long time, incidentally).
This kind of nonsense is going down all over the place, on both used and new machines. The only way to find out the realistic prices, to read the UMG and phone up some of the dealers in MCN who advertise via the small display ads. Dealers will sit there, lie with all the joy of an advert salesman, only thrown into reality by brandishing the facts before their faces and waving around the dosh. Even then, there's only a fifty-fifty chance of getting a good deal!
Pity the poor punter who just wanders in off the street and asks for advice! He (or she) will be ripped off every which way; only finding out how much money’s been wasted when they try to sell on the ever realistic private market. When, of course, it’s too late.
Dealers will say that the high sticker prices are so they can allow good trade-in values and offer decent servicing. But they have become so warped that it takes a hell of a lot of effort to work out if the deal that’s going down is good or bad, as it’s impossible to find out the cash price unless the money’s thumped down on the table, when prices can fall with shocking rapidity.
High sticker prices also allow apparently amazing HP deals to be offered, with zero rates possible - but if the prices are already inflated by a huge amount, at the end of the day the punter ends up paying more than if he borrowed the money from the bank and got a large discount off the dealer for cash.
Then there’s the problem of sorting the good from the ugly, avoiding those dealers who excel in doing crash repairs on the cheap or rebuilding bikes so they run long enough for them to get out of the showroom. I know one London dealer who gets rave revues from the glossies, who sells these kind of old dogs for top prices, and has done so, amazingly, for the past twenty years!
No wonder the private market's booming! But that’s another story.
Bill Fowler
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