The most expensive vehicle you can buy off the lot in Belize is a Toyota Land Cruiser. With all the bells and whistles it’ll touch your pocketbook for, brace yourself, $234,000. Or if your taste is a little more modest you can sample a Hyundai Veracruz and that’ll cost you just about $150,000. But those are luxury SUVs, and at tomorrow’s auto show you can look up the menu on these lobster thermidor type items, even if you do end up eating the fried chicken which, in this analogy, would be a light pickup truck like an Isuzu D-max, a Toyota Hilux, or a Mitsubishi Sportero – except in this case the fried chicken item would still cost you about $70,000. But that’s the beauty of the auto show, it doesn’t cost you anything to look. And that’s just what our news team did yesterday.
Eddie Bouley, Bravo Motors
“Eye candy is very important. You come by and you say one of these days, I will afford that car. I will be able to buy that car. That is the first mindset that you must have.”
Eye candy is also very expensive –a Dodge Nitro like this will cost you $104,000 duty paid, a Mitsubishi Montero duty paid is $120,000, and a Fortuner like this duty paid is $108,000. Big price tags, but it appears Belizeans are willing to pay.
Allan Auil, JMA Motors
“If we go back seven years, our biggest customers were the government of Belize and the big companies, big corporations and one or two wealthy individuals but now more people in the middle class and management positions in some of these companies are finding that it's better for them to buy a brand new vehicle which can be affordable for them.”
But there is a line – or what dealers call a button between what is affordable and what is a must-have no-matter-the-cost.
Eddie Bouloy,
“In all honesty, everybody has a different tipping point. We call them hot buttons. You’ve got different hot buttons. Some people come in and they want the power, some want the utility, some want the value of the car, if it is a diesel engine or what the price of the vehicle is. So each person has their own hot buttons.”
Emil Torres, Belize Diesel
“Everybody has different what you would call buttons to press and stuff like that. But at the end of the day it is all about what you want. You know at what point in life, you reach that point that you want to drive a fully loaded Prado with leather and everything to the guy who says he needs an economical vehicle to run about everyday long so I am going to get a regular Hilux, just something economical for now and then later you aspire. It is just naturally people want to grow.”
Allan Auil,
“People look for reliability. They want to know they are getting into a vehicle that will last for them for many years without any major problem, that they can travel the roads, they can travel the rough Pine Ridge and Placencia roads knowing that it won’t break down and they look for comfort. Those are mainly the three things: efficiency, reliability, and safety.”
And whatever your button is, these dealers plan to press them with the lineup at this weekend’s show.
Belize Estate and Company Limited with its line of Kia and Ford vehicles was not featured in our story but will be in tomorrow’s show. The auto show opens tomorrow morning at 9:00 at the Marion Jones Stadium. And the best part is that because of the spacious venue, you’ll be able to take the vehicles for test drives on the stadium’s outer track.
