rjsmit1

Your paydown plan should keep you nicely ahead of the curve. There is no reliable projection of 350Z depreciation, but if we allow for some speculation based on other models, we may be able to come up with something. I used Edmunds.com's "true cost to own' feature that projects 5 year depreciation for various cars. I averaged Edmund's projections for the Boxster, S2000, and MR spyder. Depreciation as a percent of original price paid averaged to the following for each year after purchase:
yr1=19.4%, yr2=8.6%, yr3=7.5%, yr4=6.7%, yr5=6.0%. (Edmunds' estimates for each model varied, but not as much as you would have throught). If you assume that you can get your performance for around $31.5k (list no options) plus $1.5k in TTL for a total of $33k, the above depreciation schedule would set the future value as follows at the end of each year:
yr1:$26.2k, yr2:$23.4k, yr3:$21k, yr4:18.8k, yr5:16.9k. If you put $10k down, your starting debt is about $23k and with a payment of $12k in the first year, you will move the balance down quickly enough that you will not be upside down. Please note the following 'fine print' on this estimate- 1) no one knows what the depreciation pattern will be in the future. 2) We could argue all day about what cars will best predict the depreciation of a 350Z. 3) I did this work fast and didn't double check the numbers, 4) This is weekend work ;-)

However, by reasonable standards, your plan is sound.

rodH

iTrader: (2)

thanks, rjsmit1

^Tyr

thanks a lot your making it a lot easier for a 20yr old understand the dynamics of buyin and selling automobiles... and I CAN afford it yay

Shift_Speed

whoa... your a physical therapist... uh please help a poor college kid out.... was it difficult and how long did it take you to get out of school... and was it easy getting a job and wat is starting salary usually for a pt.... please help ... i'm being serious

jadavis_76

first of all i work at a nissan dealership, and the hype is huge. second of all the last time i talked to a nissan rep was about three weeks ago and he informed me that they were only producing approx. 32000 z's this first year, and they are only going to have 5 years of production after that and production is supposed to drop each subsequent year. and finally, I just sold one to my OWN FATHER and they made me sell it for full sticker (no markup though). so, take this info as you will and good luck to you.

rjsmit1

I would take the production planning comments from the Nissan rep with a small grain of salt. I don't have any data on their production plans either, but logic would suggest that after they sunk the large dollars into development (likely to be in excess of $1billion), they are going to try to increase production, not decrease it. Using a lot of semi-educated assumptions, lets say that Nissan makes a gross margin before income taxes and overhead of $5,000 per vehicle, they would need to sell 200,000 of them just to get their billion dollar investment back. Clearly, I don't know if the billion is a good number or if the $5k per car is correct, either, but I do believe that Nissan and their owners at Renault? are interested in making a good return on invested capital, which normally means that over time, they want to drive up gross margins by either,
1) cutting costs (bad- can mean quality issues or reduced product support),
2) increasing sales (ok, especially if it means offering more value for the dollar)
3) increasing prices (that can be done, but usually means lower volume and Nissan had to kill the 300zx because of excessive price increases in a market that increasingly demanded more SUV's...)

Just my two cents worth... If anyone has good numbers on what Nissan invested in the Z project, we could refine this estimate... One thing that they are doing is amortizing their power train across a lot of models to help keep the fixed investment in the Z under control- very smart, especially since it is a very nice engine.

^Tyr

tranny, engine, suspension, seats (framing inside is shared w/ g35) , electronics,,,, quite a bit of the car except for the body and plastics and such is shared w/ at least some other car in thier line.

this car is assembled from parts of the other cars.
BUT WHAT A DAMN GOOD JOB THEY DID