The Fiat Punto caused a sensation due to the introductory price of 11,111 euros. It was not an era ago but only 2005. Today nobody knows the price of cars. Thanks to the use of monthly installments and fees, you no longer look at the price list but only at how much you have to pay out each month.
Thanks to this sales mechanism it has been possible, in the last decade, to get Italians on SUVs, with the average net unit value passing from 18,000 euros in 2011 to 21,000 in 2019, an increase of almost 17%. Last year, the average net value reached € 22,400, with a further jump of 7%, as emerges from the research “Car market in value” promoted by Mapfre on Dataforce data. If we then consider that public money has been added to many cars as an incentive, that value reaches 22,850 euros. However, 2020 was also an anomalous year due to the collapse of two sales segments, rent-a-car and km0. Both tend to register a rather unbalanced mix of cars in the low segments, one to satisfy that demand made by one / two people for daily rentals, the other because the goal is the license plate to artificially increase the share of the brand, and therefore we tend to maximize the result with the minimum economic commitment.
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Apart from the conjuncture of the Covid year, the phenomenon remains and it is legitimate to ask ourselves what the consequences are. The first is typical of the lack of price, which in the markets has a central function, of positioning the brand and the product, and if it disappears from the radar the customer struggles to perceive the exclusivity of certain offers. At least since the beginning of the century this has been precisely the goal of premium brands, committed to widening the range of customers downwards, with a narrative such as: today you can afford my superior quality product, thanks to installments, rentals and others. financial artifices. In the short term it worked but in the long term there is some risk, both because quality is often perceived precisely through the high price, and because quality is generally associated with exclusivity: if the premium car distinguishes me less from the others, the reason for the choice also fails.
The other consequence is yet another source of confusion for the customer. A car starts from a certain price list, which immediately disappears through a myriad of discounts to renters and dealers, to which are added on some versions the km0 one month yes and the other as well, on which the promotions of the financial companies are grafted. they play with advance, duration of installments, rates and final value. Result? Customer side: I sign and we hope that the rip-off is slight. Dealership side: however I sell the customer will think that I took advantage. Technically: the far west.