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i would like to know if i scrap my car when the COE is up,other than the PARF value do i still get body value(scrap metal)? if yes,can anyone provide estimated body value of BMW 520,Mercedes E200 and Volvo S80? Thank you.

My car coe ends next week. I don't intend to replace it as cars are too expensive nowadays.So how does one go about scrapping or deregister it to get back the PARF cash? Its a nissan sunny, thus prob body worthless?

Ok, so i'm quite fed up with my slow assed MPV. Need to change back to sedan. Could some kind hearted bro offer some advice on how to avoid being taken for a ride? I'm not worried about the mech condition of the car, but more about things like: How to ensure they do not take weeks or months to transfer the car that i am buying ? How to ensure that they transfer my current car to their company? Thank you!

Just about to collect a newly purchased vehicle. How can i go about checking that the car has been properly registered under my name and ID as the owner? What kinda documents should i expect to receive on collection? Any help on this topic is much appreciated :)

Check this useful function out ............ I have been hoping to have this for a long time Use the Depreciation Calculator to get estimated figure You can find this in the car detail of the Used car section Better if we can sort by Depreciation value

Looking to rent a budget car for work for 4/5 days during weekdays. U can have the car back on weekends. Anyone who's looking to rent out theirs pls feel free to pm me.

Hi, I am purchasing a car from my elder brother. Car still has loan and I am taking over the loan/instalments and full ownership of the vehicle. Is there any agents whom are experts in handling cases like that? No bankruptcy or bad loans on anyone of us.

A couple collected their brand new diesel car that costs $138,000 on September 21 this year. After 4 days of driving, they went to a gas station in Tampines for refuel. It was their car's first and last tank of diesel. Engine needs replacement due to water in engine. Costs of repair 28k. http://news.omy.sg/News/Local-News/story20141205-310670

Was looking at aGS300 last month at advertised price of $115k. Was thinking of waiting aft the 60 days full loan grace period before I check it out as I think price should come down. Juz went in to check and found dealer up the price to $125k!!!! What is happening???!?! R they trying to chop carrot on last min shoppers??

Just out of curiousity, if you had to choose all over again, what type of cars will you pick? This is of course choosen in your own current situation (be it expanding family, chasing a new chick etc...). It should also be within your own means...otherwise everyone will just pick 458 italia spider.

Scam or not? I think so. Summary: - Advertised my vehicle on Sgcarmart. - Received an sms to email the details of my car to his mother, tried to sms back but no number was recorded...believe sms was sent via email or something. - Did so and received a reply that she wanted to buy the car for her son who was based in Malaysia (car was to be exported) and she worked offshore so was unable to personally inspect it - Asked me to send more photos of exterior, interior and engine. - She liked what she saw, asked for best price and expressed her concerns as they were not able to personally inspect the car. - Anyway, because she works in the marine industry she had no access to the bank for TT but was able to pay for the car via paypal. - Googled paypal car buying scams and above scenario appeared frequently in the search results. - Emailed back and declined the payment method and informed them that once she had access to the bank and able to TT the funds I would happily sell. Whether the buyer was genuine, I may never know but it's very doubtful. Just a warning to those selling.

Im currently looking at a lancer ex gt manual which left abt less than 4 years life span. so far there already 3 owner to this vehicle. Was hoping to drive til scrap ( if i can lah ) but was told by many people that the moment this car go pass my hand can consider paper value cause no dealer will offer anything higher if i plan to sell and no buyer dare to buy because they will think 4 owner = car many problem. Somemore its manual which mean that resale is also low. Depre is at about 9.7k annually so not sure whether is worth it...

I have seen cars which has 2 or more owners, 8 years or older in the used car market with mileage of less than 100,000km mark. Do you personally think that this is possible based on most Singaporean driving habits? I don't drive much except to and fro work and average about 1600km per month. I might believe that the car has low mileage if it is sold by direct owner and he is the one and only owner. My father scrap his 10 year old car recently and his is one and only owner, clocked about 56,000km when scrapped. With the lemon law in place, I wonder if any dealers still resort in "rewinding" the clock back to a lesser number to attract potential victims.

Hello everybody! Long time no see! ***Where the wave emoticon go???*** Would like to ask it is worth to change my current ride to a used MPV (like Toyota Sienta, or any value for $$$ MPV) which are same year of my current ride now? I driving a Mitsubishi Lancer 1.6M GLX Sports Manual registered on Jun 2008, mileage ard 85K only and fully paid. Below are similar cars as my current ride for references. http://www.sgcarmart.com/used_cars/listing.php?ENG=4&MOD=Mitsubishi&MMO=Lancer&RPG=20&TRN=1&RGD=2008&AVL=2 Thanks in advance.

Anyone have any experience with balloon scheme cars which have reached the end of the term and needed to be scrapped ? I know that last instalment for cars under balloon scheme is normally the parf value of the car, hence, I would like to know if it is possible to surrender the car to the finance company during the last instalment month and let them sort it out themselves. The car I am driving now is a bit complicated issue as the owner has passed away and I took over the car few months before she passed away. Still have until July next year to drive and I am worried about the last instalment to the finance company since car is not under my name. Appreciate advise and assistance from fellow forumers. TIA

I thought all vehicles/road users are subject to the same rules. Noticed one exception on the road today... are they really exempt from: 1/ COE + 10 year to scrap 2/ road tax 3/ windows tinting rules?

I was just wondering. What are the cars available in singapore, new or used, that are affordable driver's cars. I know some will say a used BMW or used Lotus or used Porsche. But there exists a large group of people who cannot be seen driving such flashy cars, even if they can afford it outright. Public image or taxation issues prevent them from being seen in such cars. So what are the humble, but no less pleasurable, alternative? I will start off with: - Toyota Mark X - Suzuki Swift - Mitsubishi Evo - VW Golf GTI Any more?

In my January 2014 column, I said that Singaporeans should use 2014 to think of new Big Ideas to guide us for the next 50 years. Here is Big Idea No.1 for debate and discussion. Singapore will never be car-less, but it can and should have fewer cars. On reading this, the reader could be forgiven for thinking: ''Here goes Kishore again on his campaign to improve public transport in Singapore.'' However, this big idea is not about improving transportation. It is about improving the happiness of the Singapore population. Unhappy Singaporeans IT IS a well-known fact that the Singaporean population is not the happiest in the world. Singaporeans gripe, naturally and effortlessly. One good example of this was provided by a Straits Times article written after the Prime Minister had spoken to a group of students at the Nanyang Technological University on Jan 30. The article began with the following line: ''Nine out of 15 interviewed were concerned they won't be able to buy a flat and a car.'' The aspiration of the young for a flat is perfectly reasonable. But the aspiration of nine out of 15 for a car is not reasonable. Why not? The simple, direct and blunt answer is that if Singapore tries to squeeze the American dream - designed for a huge, almost boundless continent - into one of the tiniest countries in the world, it will effectively condemn its population to perpetual unhappiness. High car ownership ONE little known fact about Singapore is that it has one of the highest car ownership populations in the world for a city. (Repeat: For a city, and not for a country.) Mr Charles Chow, who blogs on transportation issues, says the following: ''There are roughly 550,000 to 600,000 private vehicles in Singapore. Forty-five per cent of households in Singapore own at least one car. This implies that out of the approximate 1.25 million households in Singapore, about 560,000 households have at least one car. There are 200,000 private dwellings in Singapore and slightly more than one million Housing and Development Board (HDB) flats. My simple back-of-the-envelope calculation therefore shows that more than 300,000 HDB or public housing dwellings own at least one car. Since HDB dwellings are heavily subsidised, the fact that they are also given abundant and cheap residential HDB carparks represent a further subsidy.'' Mr Chow also notes the contrast between Singapore and other cities: ''From London to Hong Kong, only the top 10 to 20 per cent of household dwellings come with carparks. Without a carpark, residents just simply cannot buy a car. In Singapore, the Government has so generously provided abundant and cheap residential carparking in the HDB estates over the years. From New York to Tokyo, office buildings are deliberately built with few or no carparks. ''In Singapore, that is not the case. Even middle managers can drive their cars to work and park their cars in office building carparks for the whole day.'' Having lived in New York for 10 years, I can only agree with Mr Chow when he says: ''Anyone who has lived in New York or Tokyo would know that even managing directors of companies, senior bankers and lawyers take public transportation to work. In Singapore, even middle-level executives working in Raffles Place drive to work. Is the Singaporean middle-level executive better paid than a senior banker in New York?'' Car ownership encouraged IN SHORT, in a country that has designed public policies to restrict car ownership (from the compulsory certificate of entitlement to high import taxes), Singapore has paradoxically ended up creating an environment that actually encourages rather than discourages car ownership. There are three ways in which Singapore encourages car ownership. Firstly, as the world's only city state, the Singapore Government wisely decided in its early years that the country would strangle itself to death as an economy if it allowed Bangkok-style traffic jams to clog our streets. But while Singapore has succeeded in creating free-flowing traffic, this has paradoxically made it rational to own a car. This is also why I own a car. I can get from my home in Siglap to my school in Bukit Timah in less than 20 minutes by driving. Any combination of public transport would take at least an hour each way. I save 80 minutes a day by driving. This provides a huge incentive to own a car. (My ultimate dream, however, is to forego owning a car. Instead, I would like to have a driverless electric vehicle - similar to the one the National University of Singapore is testing - appear at my home within 30 minutes of calling. As I learnt in Davos last month, I will be able to achieve this dream in my lifetime.) Secondly, by ensuring that car prices are among the highest in the world, Singapore has made the car one of the most important status symbols in Singapore. This explains the attraction of European car brands in Singapore. In most cases, a Japanese or Korean car can do the job of transportation equally well. But it will not enhance one's status. A European brand does. This is how we try to keep up with ''the Joneses'' in Singapore. Thirdly, as Mr Chow says, our subsidy of carparks in HDB estates makes it much easier and cheaper to own and park a car than it would be in New York, London, Tokyo or Paris. Since this subsidy has become entrenched in our society, it cannot be taken away. Any government that tries to take back perks that a population has become accustomed to is a government that wants to commit political suicide. It would be unfair to ask any government to do this. Bottom-up approach ALL this brings me to the most important point that I want to make in this article. Singapore has succeeded in its first 50 years because it had a government that thought carefully over the long term and crafted policies that would enhance the long-term interests of Singapore. This is why Singapore has free-flowing traffic. However, over the next 50 years, a new paradigm will be needed: What is needed now is a society where the people think carefully and advocate policies that are good for Singapore's long-term interests. In short, a bottom-up instead of a top-down approach is needed to solve the car problem of Singapore. In the first 50 years, Singapore had a government designing various policies to temper the desire for Singaporeans to own cars. Now, society needs to decide that since Singapore is one of the tiniest countries in the world, people should gradually give up the desire to own cars. Most Singaporeans reading this article would scoff at this notion. Let me share some good news here. In most developed countries, people are already using cars less, not more. Trend towards fewer cars AN ARTICLE from The Economist on Sept 22, 2012, provides some encouraging statistics. In the leading economies in the world (Japan, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States) ''total vehicle kilometres travelled began to plateau in 2004 and fall from 2007; measured per person, growth flatlined sooner, after 2000, and dropped after 2004 before recovering somewhat''. According to World Bank data, passenger cars per 1,000 people in the US have been gradually declining since at least 2003, a trend which accelerated somewhat after the onset of the recession in 2008. Equally encouragingly, young people in the developed world are getting driver's licences later in life (or not at all). This is good news for congestion because, according to a study conducted in the UK, people who learn to drive in their late 20s drive less than if they had learnt in their late teens. Singaporeans are proud of the fact that the country has gone from ''Third World to First World'' faster than any other nation in human history. Now, for the next 50 years, Singapore has to catch up with the First World in terms of moving away from car ownership as a dream. In my next article - Big Idea No.2 - I hope to demonstrate it is possible to make Singapore No.1 in the world when it comes to public transportation. -- ST ILLUSTRATION : Manny Francisco by Kishore Mahbubani The writer is dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Great Convergence: Asia, The West, And The Logic Of One World, which has been long-listed for the 2014 Lionel Gelber Prize, described by The Economist as ''the world's most important award for non-fiction''.

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) has setup a website to seek feedback from the general public on how COE and car ownership schemes should be tweaked. The government is trying to inject some form of social equitability in car ownership in our land-scarce island. The feedback will help the government to better delineate CAT A from Cat B, so that buyers of mass market models do not have to compete directly with luxury car buyers. However, luxury brands' penetration into CAT A is only part of the equation in contributing to the astronomical rise in COE price in the 'mass market' category. The reduction in supply of COE and ever increasing population numbers would ensure that COE prices would remain sky high. If you are interested to air your views, do visit the website

Ever wondered why so many wealthy Singaporeans advocate paying full cash for car purchases? Ever wondered what makes your car loan so profitable that dealers add a 'loading fee' to 'push' buyers to take up loans of minimum tenures? The answer lies in the deceptively quoted interest rates. Now for the non-Finance trained among you, let me go through some basics. The key difference that we are concerned with is that interest rates for car loans (or strictly speaking hire-purchase) are quoted on a flat basis as opposed to a declining basis. Under a flat basis, the interest amount payable is computed based on the total loan amount and multiplied over the years. I am sure this is familiar to all of you who have financed a car before. But, what you may not know is that for other loans such as mortgages, the interest typically is computed on a declining basis. Under this declining method, the interest is applied on the loan amount that is left and not the whole sum loaned. Simply put, as you slowly repay each part of the principal amount borrowed, your interest payable becomes less. At this point in time, I am sure the question on everyone's minds is "So what?" Well, the implication of a flat basis interest rate is that it disguises the true or real interest rate that you are paying; making you think that you are paying a much lower interest rate than you really are. Let me provide an example: Let us assume that I buy a car at $100,000, at a full loan for 3 years. For simplicity of calculations, let us assume an unrealistic interest of 10%. Based on the flat basis, my total interest is $10,000 per year. This makes my total interest $30,000 and the total sum owed $130,000. My monthly repayment is roughly $3,611. But let me input all this into my financial calculator to obtain the effective annual interest rate (or what I call the real interest rate that I am paying). It turns out that my effective annual interest rate is a hefty 19.46% or nearly double! As a contrast, if we apply the sums above in the context of a typical mortgage, my monthly repayment would be roughly $3,226. My monthly installment is more than 10% cheaper! The effective annual interest rate that I pay on the mortgage is also a more tolerable 10.47%. Of course, I won't be listing out the exact working simply because it would probably bore everyone to tears. And, the extent of deceptiveness will vary as the numbers vary. But this does not detract from my key message: Do not be deceived by the seemingly low interest rates! As much as possible, we should all endeavor to keep the amount that we loan to a minimum. Most importantly, the next time car sales people tell you that it is good to take a loan for the car because you can reinvest your spare cash to obtain better returns, take it with a hefty pinch of salt!

At the time of writing, Certificates of Entitlement (COE) prices for big cars have reached a new high this year - with premiums for big cars reaching S$76,000. COEs for small cars rose S$5,823 to S$56,112. The COE, instituted by the government of Singapore since May 1990, is a program designed to limit car ownership and hence the number of vehicles on the country's roads. A high COE price will dash the hope of some young families of owning a car. A car could be a necessity for a young couple with an infant child in order to ferry the child to a child care centre in the morning before heading to work. Perhaps, a fairer way is to ballot the limited COE instead of bidding for it. A similar concept could be adopted like the way BTO flats are balloted. A first time car buyer could be given 3 chances in the ballot. An existing car owner who is driving a car with a balloted COE for less than 5 years could be given 2 chances and in the same fashion, an existing car owner who is driving a car with a balloted COE for less than 3 years could be given just 1 chance. An existing car owner who has not balloted for a COE for the past 5 years will be treated like a first time car buyer. The above suggestion could be further refined for implementation. The downside of a balloting system could be a rise in the price of resale cars as people in need of a car urgently may not want to try their luck at balloting. I hope the relevant authority can look into the suggestion. The main purpose of the COE, as highlighted in the first paragraph, is to limit car ownership, unless the COE system has now become a profit centre instead.

By now, you would have read the news that the Government is planning to reduce the vehicle population growth of Singapore. And of course, you would have known the potential implications this will have on car (and COE) prices in Singapore. It's a topic as old as the COE system itself, but it's still one that rages on regardless. I don't begrudge the Government for doing what it is doing, because let's face it, Singapore is a small country. We cannot accomodate that many cars on our roads. But it's the fickle indecision of the Government that bugs me. What do they really want to curb, ownership or usage? I wish they would make up their minds and set the true agenda, so that we can all be clear what the situation is and adapt accordingly. I personally am for curbing usage. Let people own cars, but make them think twice about driving. One way to do this is to make it inconvenient to drive into town. Not just expensive, but inconvenient and troublesome. I mean, if you are going to encounter closed roads and trouble finding (cheap) parking, wouldn't you seriously reconsider driving into the CBD? And thus cars will be free for use around the surburbs on the weekends or during off-peak hours for family or social activities. Of course, the public transport system to and from town has to be vastly improved from the current situation for this to work, so the onus is on the relevant Government bodies to think about how they want to go about implementing this effectively, if they do consider it. I'm sure people have their own opinions, so I'll be happy to hear them.