Buying a New Car - How much does it really cost?

At first glance, a car might not seem too expensive when looking at it's base Recommended Retail Price (RRP). However, what some people fail to consider are the other costs like dealer delivery, statutory charges and extras that the dealer will inevitably try to sell you.

Canberra Toyota has been helpful in this regard in that they give you the cost of statutory charges and dealer delivery.

So let's use their figures as an example.

Let us say that we've decided to purchase a Toyota Yaris YR 5dr 1.3.

Base RRP = $16,390

The base RRP doesn't include metallic paint or the safety pack (the latter probably being pretty worthy of consideration since it's a light car).

Metallic Paint = $300
Safety Pack = $750
New total = $17,440

Now onto the extra charges. As we can see from here, this is what you can expect to pay extra:

Dealer Delivery = $1,495
Establishment Fee = $60
Insurance = $30
Annual Registration = $608-777 (The figures have actually increased for the ACT. Since a Yaris has a tare weight of 1,000kg this means that it'll cost about $630 to register)
Stamp Duty = 3% (for a Yaris as its price is below $45,000 - I'm also assuming this applies to the revised price after you've added extras) = $523

Therefore the final total is $20,178

"But wait there's more!"....

Most dealers will try and convince you to purchase other extras like paint protection, window tinting and rust proofing.

Doing a bit of research on this I've discovered according to the NRMA, window tinting is nice, but unnecessary, paint protection is usually adequate on new vehicles nowadays (but if you want to do it you can do so at a fraction of the price dealers charge) and rust proofing is just about useless. So if you can, try and resist the urge of spending on these extras because they can easily add an extra $1,000-2,000 to the price of your vehicle. If you want to do paint protection, apparently spending about $200 on a DIY kit will suffice.