New cars in Australia have been further delayed with a waitlist increase of a further couple of months. Alongside this, the price of used cars has surged recently, as over 20,000 cars have been written off due to flood damage and buyers bid up the price of repurchasing a used car. The floods impacting Brisbane, Queensland, and Northern New South Wales, have destroyed people’s properties, cars and contents. The natural disaster has impacted both businesses and consumers, which is especially difficult when you add this to the impacts of Covid-19. The expected flood damage costs are estimated to be above $2 billion dollars.
With over 22,000 owners making insurance claims on their damaged motor vehicles, the demand for used cars has surged as families and workers require transportation to get to and from work, school, the grocery store and other necessary services. Following the increase in used car demand, used car prices have also rapidly increased as potential buyers bid against one another to secure a car for themselves to replace their damaged ones.
New cars have already had significant barriers to reaching the local Australian market due to the Covid-19 omicron strain and the multitude of issues that were created with it. These included increased costs of computer chips, labour shortages and its flow-on effects, as well as expensive shipping costs. Australia’s floods have further added to new car transportation delays, adding thousands of new customers to an already long waitlist.
Some insurance claimants have expressed distress due to waiting long periods of time to hear back from their insurance companies. Some delays have surpassed 14-days since the claims were first made. This means that even if cars were available for purchase, the claimant would not have the disposable income to purchase a used or new car until the claim is settled.
Although significant car delays exist, life must go on, and workers are finding it difficult to travel to and from their daily commitments without reliable transportation of their own, leaving some workers to carpool, or families to share one car for all their household transportation and shopping requirements.
Although Australia’s major flooding events have now ceased, the three intense floods between February 2022 to April 2022 have left significant damage to properties and infrastructure throughout Australia. This was definitely not needed as we add strain to an already stretched system. With new and used car buyers not getting a break since the Covid-19 omicron outbreak and current dealers stating that waiting times are between 6-12 months, it’s a difficult landscape to navigate for both Australian consumers and international suppliers.