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MONEY COMMENT
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I'm no Jeremy Clarkson, but I'm occasionally called upon to write about buying and running a car. This is pretty rich, when you consider that I haven't sat behind the wheel for about 3½ years! However, I have worked in the motor finance industry, which helped me to haggle a tidy sum off the price of my wife's last car, so I have 'walked the walk' as well as 'talking the talk'. Anyway, it appears that Britain's going car crazy, with sales so far this year even running ahead of this time last year (a record 2.5m new cars were sold in the whole of 2002). According to the latest survey from Sainsbury's Bank, almost 6.5 million of us plan to buy a car over the next six months. Two out of three (4.25m) intend to buy a used car, 1.67m want a new car, 322,000 fancy a pre-registration vehicle and 257,000 are as yet undecided. These prospective car-buyers plan to spend a total of £46 billion on their purchases, or just under £7,200 on average. A quarter of this money, an estimated £11.3 billion, will be borrowed. Before you take the dealer's finance (even interest-free deals - a discount could be worth more), read this article on finding the best personal loan for you. Here's one dealer trick to watch out for: salespeople usually quote 'flat' interest rates, so always ask for the APR, which will be around twice as high! According to the Alliance & Leicester (LSE: AL.) Car Price Index, new-car prices fell 1.5% in the year to July, with three-year-old cars down 7.5%, so we're spending less on our motors. What's more, prices are expected to fall further later in the year, when consumer spending is expected to slide and dealers could struggle to make tough sales targets. More good news: together with What Car?, Sainsbury's Bank produces a realistic Target Price for every new model on sale, and claims you can easily haggle around £1,200 off the price of a typical new car. So, if you don't like negotiating, call the Target Price Hotline on 0845 123 2620, and What Car? will put you in touch with a dealer willing to match its Target Price. Collectively, we could save billions of pounds every year if we paid more attention to these five important aspects of car ownership: So, before you shell out tens of thousands of pounds on your shiny new coupé, saloon or estate, do your homework first, as you could end up saving thousands. Happy motoring! More: Visit our Personal Loan and Insurance centres | Used Car Bargains | SmarterMotoring.com. The author owns shares in HBOS plc, the parent company of Bank of Scotland, which owns 45% of Sainsbury's Bank.