How to choose the right new car in 2023 (full details)

How do you sort through a market with 60 different brands, 300 different models on sale, with 15 options in all the popular segments? How do you find that Goldilocks new car for you?

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Of all of the questions I get by email, the most common one is. ‘I'm so confused. Which car is right for me? Please help.’

It’s perfectly understandable. Every carmaker on every carmaker's website can give you a thousand reasons why their car is not just good but excellent and coincidentally the best car for you.

There's all this noise you've got to filter through to find what they're not saying. They never tell you what’s wrong about their car, just like every CV you've ever read or written - it's just full of lies and omissions, essentially.

There's so much money on the line, even if you are buying the cheapest nastiest shittiest car in Australia, that's still probably a pretty big spend for you. It might be the first brand new car you've ever owned and you really don't want to stuff it up, do you? 

AutoExpert got this question from Jacob who's essentially got this problem, and apparently he's also got a bit of a problem with me, which I'm okay with.

Jacob says:

I've watched a lot of your content. I noticed that your opinion is that various manufacturers of ute in Australia are awful for reasons relating to either corporate fraud, reliability or

customer service problems.

I've recently started a gardening business, currently running it out of my 2013 Toyota Corolla (no, honestly) and I'm looking at buying a ute in the near future, because it would be more compatible with my chosen profession.

However, if Ford and Isuzu are problematic due to reliability and customer service issues, Volkswagen and Toyota have previous instances of massive corporate fraud and I simply don't fit in a Mazda (I'm quite tall and the interiors of Mazdas don't accommodate).

what brand of you should I get?

This is the ultimate ute-based quandary.

First-off, Mazda BT-50 is the Isuzu D-Max, they're just different in hair and makeup, so one's blonde and the other one's brunette, but they're dizygotic twins, otherwise.

All manufacturers are just so used to screwing over the greater population of ours that they're all much of a muchness. Obviously they don't start every day with the intention of taking advantage of you, car makers are just sociopaths. They behave as if they only think about themselves and they don't have any empathy for you, except to the extent that they do have empathy where it's better to comply with consumer law than not.

Bittersweet though it is, some of them have decided that it's a marketing initiative because actually doing the right thing by people gets the word around. And some of them have decided that they make more money by not complying with consumer law.

In terms of answering Jacob's question, I'd buy the Triton and not only ‘I would I’, I did buy a Triton: here’s how to jack one up >>.

If you're running a gardening business out of a Corolla, a ute is going to be a massive upgrade, particularly in the context of being able to carry dirty, bulky, heavy, long, sharp crap. For this reason, I'd suggest that a Triton, although not the most heavy-duty of workhorses and not the most capable in terms of its outright tow capacity, it's the best value in terms of bang for your buck.

If you buy a 4x4 Triton, it's got the most advanced four-wheel drive system of all its competitors in that genre, because you can use four-wheel drive high-range on a high traction surface with the center diff unlocked.

You can't do that in the majority of the ute competition, because they're set up like a Massey Harris tractor for four-wheel drive; you need to be on a slippery surface before you can engage four-wheel drive. Therefore, you lose the benefits that you would get in the Triton or in a four-wheel drive like an SUV wagon, such as a Hyundai Santa Fe or Kia Sorento.

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WHY TRITON?

With the money you save buying Triton over an equivalent Hilux or Ranger, if you're

running your gardening business, just get a tow bar fitted so that if you run out of storage volume or load carrying capacity, get yourself an eight by five trailer with high sides. Mine weighs 400 kilos and it's got a two-tonne aggregate trailer mass, so it's got a payload capacity of 1.6 tonnes which is roughly double the payload capacity of the Triton so you can carry

a shitload more additional stuff in a trailer. Even if you limit yourself to two tonnes of towing mass, a Triton is going to tow that easily. If the trailer is properly set up/loaded, you'll hardly even feel it. That's the solution in Jacob's case.

But more broadly, how do you decide if you're not in the market for a ute or, if your objective is different, like wanting to drive the Canning Stock Route or go to Cape York or spend 12 months as a grey nomad towing the aluminium, acoustically-transparent caravan to Dingo Piss Creek, how do you do that? Or maybe you want to downsize and just want a small fuel-efficient car. Perhaps you want a hybrid or you want an EV. The process is the same.

You've got to get from this big list of competitor brands to the short list of cars that are right for you. In the current market, where demand grossly outstrips supply, and waiting lists of 12 months are hardly uncommon, what you've got to do is find this shortlist and then balance that up against what you can get in a timely fashion, if that matters.

Here's how I suggest you do that. The easiest process of elimination to go through is that of manufacturers because they define the culture of customer support. When you buy a car, you cannot divorce yourself from the manufacturer of that car, because if it fails, under warranty or not, later on you are going to depend on them for some form of support.

With that in mind let’s get into the top 10 or 12 Brands and I'll tell you what's wrong with them and anything that’s right.

There's this incredible situation in cars in Australia right where excellence in customer support doesn't really exist, because the market is so bad - and the bad players are so awful with customers - that the benchmark for excellence is actually just the brands that comply with consumer law and to me that's incredible. And incredibly sad.

So, here are the top 10 carmakers according to VFACTS, which is the industry sales figures brochure that comes out once a month.

Toyota is on top and they're generally pretty good, I think, except when they decide to cover up a deficiency. See, Toyota has spent so much money marketing the myth that it is

“Unbreakable”, supremely ‘reliable’ - except they cannot admit publicly when they screw something up and this has happened several times, the most recent of which was the Federal Court deciding that Toyota was guilty of misleading and deceptive conduct in relation to 2.8 litre Hilux, Fortuner and Prados with defective DPF engineering, basically. Roughly 260,000 vehicles with a potential compensation bill of $2.7 billion; everybody knew that something was wrong with those engines and Toyota wouldn’t see it or comment. Although, one organisation in particular did bring it to light and copped a filthy legal letter from Toyota's lawyers. 

Essentially, Toyota took a high level decision to lie to 260,000 people about the fit-for-purpose nature of those vehicles. Click here for the latest on the Toyota class action story >> 

Mazda's number two and on the 14th of April in 2022 the ACCC filed an appeal against the Federal Court's decision to dismiss the ACCC's allegations that Mazda had engaged in unconscionable conduct. Mazda got pinged for a bunch of things and this happened in November of 2021. The court found that Mazda engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct and made false or misleading representations to nine consumers about their consumer guarantee rights, basically.

My gut feeling is since November 2021, Mazda's really lifted its game because I've seen plenty of emails from customers who have effectively said, ‘you know, I've got an eight-year-old Mazda and the engine just shattered itself and they're replacing it for free’. This is night and day.

I think Mazda actually deserves the benefit of the doubt currently, when it comes to compliance, which as I explained, is almost excellence in relative terms at least when it comes to dealing with customers.

Mitsubishi is currently number three in Australia and I'd suggest that they're pretty good; about the only thing that they've swiftly pulled is that if you want the sweet 10-year warranty (which has been okayed by the ACCC), you must get the car serviced by the dealer and on time as well. Now, I thought that was pretty shifty because you should be able to take your car wherever you can. But the reality is you can take your car wherever you want to get it serviced, it's just that if you do that the warranty goes back to five years.

I'm pretty happy with it at the moment because every 12 months it costs me like 300 bucks to get my car serviced. It's a cheap bill in the context of what it costs you to live.

Watch the full report to get the full good and bad rundown on the top 10 brands.

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