DETROIT -- Car shoppers, especially millennials, are willing to pay more for the technology they want in a vehicle.
And shoppers who plan to finance their vehicle are willing to pay slightly more than cash buyers.
Those are two of the conclusions from AutoTrader’s 2017 Car Tech Impact Study, conducted in late September, and released this month just ahead of the 2007 it auto show.
On average, the study found, cash buyers across all age groups were willing to pay an additional $2,151 to get the technology they wanted. Shoppers across all age groups who planned to finance the vehicles said they were willing to pay, on average, an additional $2,356.
That works out, on average for all buyers, to an additional $2, 276 they were willing to spend. The millennials surveyed said they’d be willing to spend an additional $2,617 to get the tech features they want.
One implication of the study seemed to be that F&I managers should advise their sales counterparts not to start discounting a vehicle’s price if it’s clear that the vehicle offers technology that the shopper really wants.
Brian Moody, executive editor at AutoTrader, put it slightly differently. “The key takeaway is that this is a case where the customer says, ‘I want this and -- ta-da -- I’m willing to pay for it,’” he said. “That’s not the way it usually works for Americans. Usually, it’s, ‘I want it, so throw it in for free.’”
The importance of a vehicle’s having the technology that buyers want was underscored by another of the study’s findings. Of the consumers surveyed, 61 percent said that they’d rather have a vehicle with the technology they want vs. 39 percent who said they’d rather have a vehicle in the color they want.
