Good Buy?

[BLISTC]

Never had a car loan in over 20yrs of driving, i've leased a couple but personally I think If i can't afford to pay for it...I can't afford to drive it.

A car dealer with a 30k car will have between 2-5k of puff in their price..so min 1.5k off.

Private sales are fun, if you're any good you can generally crunch the shit out of the price and get a far better deal than a yard can offer. But never forget Caveat emptor.

not necessarily true, as when i was buying my v35, there was 1 dealer who had them for $41,999 listed on the yard price, but i said to him i only have $31,000, and he said lets go inside you can have it for that much. this was around September last year right before all these markets and the yen crashed. imo, the dealer got the cars in cheaper than usual and hiked the price up. So it pays to know how much they are ACTUALLY worth via an import first, then add on GST overheads, dealer costs, wages etc. and you kind of get a rough price of how much the car was pay for in japan.

These days however the v35's are worth much more to bring in because of the poor exchange rate. So there is less margin on the cars being brought in, meaning less to haggle.

[Eldubb]

I can also recommend Nagaoya Motors - i live in qld and they were great to deal with over the phone/emails. very upfront and no bs, as nismo mentioned - alex was good to deal with. make sure you ask them to send hi-res pics as he is happy to do it, and of course get it checked out over there by someone you trust if you can.

[g33k]

I unlike the rest of the forum members wouldn't recommend Nagoya Motors, i went to inspect a white 2dr coupe with 17K(ish) - the timing belt was squeeking, the car stalled twice during the test drive with the clutch FULLY down.

It also claimed to have a grade 4 auction exterior, the rear bumper was a different paint and there was clear rubber wear for a car with that level..

My opinion of course.......

I will agree Alex was a nice guy.... but not sure i believe the odo reading...

Edited February 6, 2009 by g33k

[BLISTC]

its very easy to get the odometer changed - just change the clusters over isnt it? 2nd hard parts are plentiful on yahoo japan

[Touge Kyousou]

I unlike the rest of the forum members wouldn't recommend Nagoya Motors, i went to inspect a white 2dr coupe with 17K(ish) - the timing belt was squeeking, the car stalled twice during the test drive with the clutch FULLY down.

It also claimed to have a grade 4 auction exterior, the rear bumper was a different paint and there was clear rubber wear for a car with that level..

My opinion of course.......

I will agree Alex was a nice guy.... but not sure i believe the odo reading...

That's a worry. Though i'm not sure if it was the timing belt squeeking as i'm quite certain the VQ35DE runs a timing chain. Would've been some form of drive belt though. The stalling with clutch down is a big red light though haha.

And yeah, if you swap clusters the odo readout will change as it's stored on the cluster's elec boards. If you know where to look, generally you'll find people also able to tamper with your original cluster to change the readout as well. Pretty gay but oh well.. just inspect it well or get stateroads etc to check it. Imho, km's generally isn't too big a deal long as servicing etc has been done well. Just make sure to do a compression test and check for head gasket leaks (into the spark plug chamber).. still too new to leak to outside and drip down.

[mosoto]

The one thing I stress to everyone looking at imports - judge the car for what it is and ignore the km's.

On the above that car has travelled approx 4600km a year. Given it's not a super rare or special car in Japan, how many people you know in Australia that buy a Commodore and only travel 5000km's a year in it?

Unless it's got log books, I would ignore the k's and look at the condition.

I do and don't agree with you on this issue, yes Km's do not matter but why, because you have absolutely no idea how long the engine has been running to achieve those km's. This is why heavy machinery use time not km's. These Japanese cars spend hours in conjested traffic but travel short distances. just my 2c

[Stephen Thorpe]

I do and don't agree with you on this issue, yes Km's do not matter but why, because you have absolutely no idea how long the engine has been running to achieve those km's. This is why heavy machinery use time not km's. These Japanese cars spend hours in conjested traffic but travel short distances. just my 2c

Good point there...

[Mr Eps]

...bloody japs..