Hello everyone. Newbie here with a newbie question.
I’m in the market for A 2015 Sport Nav MX-5, and am wondering where I should look to find them. All I can see on Autotrader and Pistonheads is Trade sales and hardly any private at all. Even on here I can see only one old ad.
Are they hard to come by privately, am I looking in the wrong place, or are there just not that many about?
Any pointers greatly appreciated!
Many thanks
You looking for 1.5 or 2.0?
What sort of budget.
Oop 1.5, should have specified. Budget is the going rate but I’d like to avoid the extra charge from a Stealer
The answer could be the owners aren’t releasing them yet. Private sellers I’m guessing will start changing, moving up to a newer model say after 3 years. Dealers will have more for sale ex lease/company cars, part ex cars.
Whatever you get, check that any remaining warranty is intact - and even if expired, that services were done on time. You can ask a Mazda dealer - the service records should be on their system. Even after the warranty period, the service record is of value if you need goodwill from Mazda.
When I was looking for a car in August/September, I was puzzled to see a lot of cars with non-franchised dealers. I did wonder if some of these had ‘lost’ their warranty through late or missing services, precluding them from being sold as approved used by Mazda dealers. An advert can often state “FSH” when that is not quite true.
Many ‘Private’ cars are for sale on other websites, and in local (often free weekly) newspapers. I don’t look for a new ND as the car I have suits me fine, but I’m sure there are cars for sale out there, you just have to look.
Bear in mind there are (still) more people out there with an MX5 of any version than are members of this club, there’s nearly a dozen around me, but only one ND, and none are members. Mainly an unsociable lot, but that’s life. Many cars are Sunday (fine day) only cars, bought for fun, and I’m afraid to say, because it is regarded as a ‘cheap’ convertible. (hence the ‘fine day’). ‘Dad’s last fling’.
Good luck with your search anyway. - Have you tried a google search?
Hello everyone, and thank you all for your help. Yes I have looked on google but all the usual suspects are dealers only. I will check the local rags and maybe eBay as well.
Appreciate the tips about FSH too.
ive previously owned an Elise and there’s never a shortage of private sale cars there, and seeing how niche they are I was expecting buckets full of mx-5s, especially considering how highly rated they are. Maybe that model is still too young to be so prevalent in the second hand market.
Could it be that many cars are bought on PCP now so end up back at dealers?
As I recall, back in the day, even the supply of Mk1s was tightly controlled. When I brought my Mk1 import in November 1997, one of the reasons was that outside of the Mazda dealer network, it was nigh on impossible to find a MX5 (as was the case for the Honda CRX, the car I was originally looking for at the time). A 1990 car through Mazda was £10k, but a 1992 import was £8k.
Roadster Robbie is right - hardly anyone sells nearly 2-3 year old cars, they are given back to the dealer and the owner rolls into a new finance agreement - “a new car for the same monthly payment!”. This being the case a lot of 2 year old cars should be appearing at dealers about now. Also with the MX5 being the type of car it is, lots of them are bought as retirement presents and kept for years. This means the private sellers will be few and far between.
I bought my ND at 8 months old, it had been traded in to a Mercedes dealer for an SL63 (bit of a change) and was being sold through their trade-ins branch.
In excess of 80% of cars are purchased on PCP or bank loans.
To any extent normal second cars say VW UP or similar sized cars say under £12k may well be purchased for cash but above that we have been won over by PCP with it’s lower up front payments and we want it now!.
In virtually all cases PCP customers are following the option to give it back and take out a new one therefore they in the majority of cases go back via a dealer.
Mazda dealers I have spoken to are not all fans of selling the MX5. In the case of a Mazda 2 or Mazda 3, the dealers know that they can sell say 5 of each of these cars a month let’s say not an exact number but on an MX5 they can sell 3 a months on certain months but they advise they can go through a few months when the do not sell any even in the better weather.
Now that is very location dependent and in certain areas the MX5 is a better seller, therefore Mazda dealers that take cars back will punt a good number of them to the trade as they do not want to be stuck with them.
Then the next problem is warranty and finance. If you have the cash to purchase a £12k to £15k car you are a very unusual person for a garage to deal with these days apart from Subaru as they get a high number of cash buys but have a tiny market share.
Second people these days will buy a £1,000 car from a dealer and take the dealer to the small claims court if the car is not up to spec as the purchasers are of the opinion than any purchase at all is looked after by someone else.
So you are looking to purchase a car from a punter without a warranty from the punter and you actually have cash to spend. You are an unusual buyer, therefore due to the very low number of similar purchasers, people have given up expecting a person like yourself to come along and just trade in the car via the “car trade”.
Can I suggest people who are not after a warranty and have cash are now out of fashion today, not a criticism just someone who is in the minority.
Bingo. Well done Sherlocks I think that must be the answer. Thanks a lot for spending the time to answer my question.
I’m quite old school and only buy stuff when I can afford it and avoid loans, and the car market and economy has changed I guess, with cheap lending and buying everything on credit.
Ive saved up to buy one outright, and I suppose unless you are loaded, many wouldn’t sell on a car so early Into ownership
As I understand, the cars are very well made having been through so many iterations I’m not overly concerned about a lack of warranty. Or should I be?
My antipathy towards dealers is that I’m just paying an extra grand or two for the same car which would have been sold privately had the buyer found someone.
We must be a dying breed. I also prefer to pay outright for a car and also usually buy privately if looking at a used car. Last time we bought a new car (2013) we had quiet a few salesmen who had no idea how to deal with a cash paying customer. Whenever you ask for a price, they start talking about monthly amounts. You have to stop them and explain, you have no interest in paying interest, you just want a cash figure. It’s amazing how many have absolutely no idea how to negotiate a price. They’re more used to throwing in some mats to sweeten the deal. PCP may be the way forward, but I like to own what I buy from day 1, and that’s the way it will stay.
At least if you check it out, you have your eyes open. I was thinking more of manufacturer warranty rather than dealer warranty on older used cars, which are often fairly useless - you have rights of course, but who wants to get into that kind of a scrap?
Better a solid year’s warranty left on a 2015 ND than say having the “gearbox problem” and then getting into an argument because the first service wasn’t done until 15 months (or not at all). But if it’s £2,500 cheaper, and you trust yourself to spot any existing problems, you might well be happy to take the chance.
Incidentally, re PCP - when I was looking for a car in September, I left a holding deposit on a car being traded in at 2 years old. It was on a three year PCP, but the dealer had rolled the ‘owner’ into a new RF for the same monthly payment, early-settling the first one. There’s no law that they have to be kept for for full term. (I didn’t buy the car in the end - when it came in and I saw it, a month later, it was a bit more knocked about than I had hoped for).
For a 2 year old, looking for a private car makes sense - cheaper than a dealer, but with some proper warranty left if it has been serviced on time. I did ring up about a couple, including a 15,000 miler advertised on this forum, but they had both gone. Hence I ended up with the 6 month old Arctic from a Mazda dealer, and I probably overpaid a bit at 18.5k - I could have got a new SEL-Nav from a broker with metallic paint for only £200 more, so I was balancing the heated leather seats (and a few more trivial extras such as auto lights and wipers, parking sensors)) against the newness and the extra 4,000 miles on the clock of the Arctic. That said, the only privately advertised Arctic I saw was 18k.
Incidentally, I also prefer buying outright - I hate monthly commitments, the regular bills I can’t avoid are quite enough for me. The only car loan I have ever had was in 1978 for £500 and I resented every £22 monthly repayment!
Yes to that here too.
Dealers only seem want to sell you a finance deal, add on a service deal, a car protection deal, wheel scuff insurance etc etc.
The last car I bought was so quick, 20 minutes from walking in the door to driving away. I did the deal online and later by phone to arrange to pay and collection. When they were lining up the various depts to speak to me to sell me the add-ons I just said politely, show me who I pay the arranged price and I’ll be on my way. I only asked one question, anything off for cash, a resounding no came back.
It is a game, one than can be enjoyed if you know what the cars are really worth. Always do the research first - just like with ‘Homes under the Hammer’.
I’ve always bought for cash. Folding money is amazingly effective in private sales; once I haggled the seller down from 1200 to 800, and then produced a dozen brand new fifty pound notes. He took the 600. After I spent about a hundred rebuilding the engine the car was worth over 2000, but that was thirty years ago and I don’t think I could be bothered with stripping an engine down to its littlest bits these days.
However I don’t mention cash at a dealer’s until after I’ve knocked the price down, every time they mention payments deflect them by asking instead about another free option or free extra or discount. If you and partner can work as a team in this way, so much the better. Armed with knowledge of market values at the time, I’ve also been prepared to walk away. For the last two cars we bought at dealers, I used the debit card to do the balance transfer. Scary seeing so much cash shift in less than a minute when considering how many years it took me to accumulate it.
Well this all shows how out of touch I am. So I’m seeing so many people driving new cars and I’m thinking I must be on skid row compared to them, but it’s all on tick!? The only big loan I’ve taken is the mortgage but that doesnt really count.
So it looks like the sticker price is just the beginning when it comes to the dealer extracting cash from you. In fact, the other day when I was in a showroom and the salesman offered me PCP I had no idea what he was on about and thought it was something I should shove up my nose.
Hmm, so it’s not looking good for my haggling options in a showroom if their prices are allegedly rock bottom to try and snare you in on a high % loan. So if I asked for a grand off on a 2015 ND would I be slung out into the alleyway amongst the dustbins?
At the moment you will get a discount for cash off a new MX5 that is a prereg.
With regards to secondhand cars the market is different.
If you are a dealer at the bottom of the food chain you give say up to £350 off say £8,000 car.
Above that say £10k to £16k the problem for certain easy saleable cars is that the auction prices can price you out the market where large Diesel SUV’s are cheaper.
It is a case of chasing the odd private sale but as you say they are nor always available but some of the trade in prices I have heard about from dealers are very low.
I think as I have said the market at the moment is about credit but as always there must be a punter somewhere trying to sell their MX5 ND. It is just a case of waiting.