What are the right options for your new car?

A customer walks into a new-car showroom and points at a bare-bones vehicle on steel wheels, telling the sales person: "I want that one".

It sounds like a joke, but it's a very serious matter. That sort of buyer is on the endangered species list.

More often than not, we're being drawn into a long, protracted process in which the sales person hooks you and gradually wrestles you to the shore like the biggest of big fish – all the while tempting you closer to a deal with a range of exotic (and expensive) options.

The fact of the matter is this: options don't necessarily increase the resale value of your car, but they can make it easier to sell the car.

It goes without saying, for example, that a soft-road SUV with a manual transmission is going to take longer to sell than the same vehicle but with an automatic.

That's rule number one for buying a new car: don't order the car with a manual transmission unless the car is a sports car or a performance car – and debatably, at a pinch, a serious off-roader.

Inevitably, a car fitted with the wrong option can sit around in your driveway for months, waiting for the right buyer to come along. If you're lucky, the right buyer might run his own driving school and be in the market for a conventional passenger car or SUV with a manual transmission to teach manual driving.

Otherwise, there's little call for manual boxes these days.

There are buyers who maintain that a sunroof should not even be offered as an option in a country like Australia.

These buyers frequently live in the northern parts of the country, where the temperature is relatively warm right throughout the year and the sun will beat down directly through the sunroof glass, potentially turning the cabin of even a mega-large SUV like the BMW X7 into a furnace, with or without a sunblind.

A sunroof is often a relatively expensive option for a new car, usually costing at least $2000 – unless it’s either standard for that trim level or bundled up in an option pack. At the other end of the car’s life with the first owner, however, the sunroof adds very little to the car’s resale value.

Typically of more importance to a second owner than a sunroof are issues such as the car’s service history, mileage and condition. That’s how the buyer will decide on what’s a fair transaction price. And as already mentioned, a sunroof in a hot climate might actually deter buyers.

There’s a reason why car companies more often than not charge for metallic paint: people buy it. And they'll buy it even when a company like Tesla is charging Model X buyers at least $2860 for the option.

That said, the most popular colour is usually white – which can be offered in a premium coating (metallic, mica, pearlescent, et cetera) – but is usually a solid colour.

When you, the first owner, are advertising your white car for sale, what you’re telling the prospective buyer is ‘come and get it, this car is going cheap’.

White cars may be harder to sell and they look like (and frequently are) ex-fleet/government vehicles that have been passed around like a lady of the night at the footy club’s booze-up. This is why more and more rental firms are choosing middle-ranking trim levels and metallic colours for more expensive cars. They’re easier to sell at the end of their working life.

With metallic paint the car companies have you over a barrel. Companies like Subaru don’t charge for the option, but it’s probably factored into the ‘as-standard’ price anyway.

If the car you purchased new is finished in a prestige-paint colour, it will be easier to sell and you may not have to negotiate the transaction price down quite as far to win the business. If it’s a broadly appealing colour, such as Mazda’s ‘Soul Red’, dealers are more likely to accept your car as a trade-in.

Hero colours are great when they’re part of the zeitgeist. They don’t always age well, culturally speaking. Reds and blues seem to be popular, and likewise the de rigeur monochrome colours (black, grey, silver) of German prestige cars. But watch out for colours that ‘flop’ and/or secondary colours (orange, purple, green, etc) in bright hues.

If you’re buying a prestige car you’ll likely have the choice of just leather and premium leather, but cowhide is still offered occasionally as an option in lower-priced cars.

Is it worth the extra money? It depends, but $12,600 for the extended leather package that you can order with your Audi A8 seems excessive. Especially as there's more leather for your to clean, and leather can look grubby quite quickly if you can't be bothered.

Premium leather, as an extra-cost option, won’t improve your car’s resale value much, and it’s no easier to maintain and keep clean than standard leather upholstery. Leather can be expensive to keep looking good if you don’t garage the car regularly.

It will degrade faster in Australia’s sun, although some prestige cars do offer leather that resists sun damage better these days, particularly in convertibles.

On balance, however, the premium leather upgrade option is probably not worth the money, unless it screams prestige ambience and comfort – and you absolutely fall in love with it. Not every option should be discounted just because it won’t boost the resale value three years from now.

There is a school of thought that synthetic upholstery that mimics leather is a better choice. It lasts longer, wears better, requires little upkeep and provides much the same sort of comfort as natural leather. All that may be true, but these faux-leather materials add no more value to the car when it’s time to flog it off.

As a final point, ask your partner to choose the colour of upholstery if you’re colour blind (or just basically lacking taste).

There was a time when woodgrain veneer looked classy and was actually made of wood. It may have been a contrived plastic applique bonded to plywood, but it was actual wood nonetheless.

These days, woodgrain looks cheesy, fake and, in many cases, try-hard. It’s very rare for woodgrain to look anything other than the cheap, extruded plastic tat that it is, and it usually looks completely out of place in a modern car. Even in the case of the Holden Acadia LTZ-V, with woodgrain that's sombre, dark and applied sparingly, it still looks cheap and fake.

Veneers are frequently available as options in the price lists of prestige cars. They’re often supplied in a suite with a particular type of seat upholstery, or sometimes in isolation.

Choosing the right décor is something that should be done holistically – taking into account more than just the cabin. You wouldn’t, for example, choose woodgrain veneer for a Nissan GT-R.

The manufacturer’s standard carbon-fibre look is appropriate for that car, and no amount of olde-worlde embellishment is going to add to the car’s appeal.

Similarly, satin-finish aluminium, dark chrome and gloss piano-black lacquer can look elegant, but is increasingly common in near-prestige cars and there may come a time when it’s a cliched look.

As with other options, a customised interior won’t necessarily earn you more money at resale time, but one that’s an assault on the eyes will certainly detract from the car’s overall appeal, and will drive away buyers.

It’s only a matter of time before all cars are fitted as standard with autonomous emergency braking. And that time is approaching fast. But there are other active safety features that are yet to be universally adopted as part of a car’s standard specification.

These include lane-keeping, reverse cross-traffic warning, 360-degree cameras and blind-spot monitoring. In many cases, these features are either fitted as standard, like the EyeSight system in the Subaru Forester, or offered as part of a safety pack. It’s rare, but not completely unknown, for a company to offer these as separate features.

They won’t necessarily add to the car’s resale value when you’ve enjoyed it for three to five years and figure it’s time to move on, but your car without that safety equipment will be competing in the used-car marketplace against heaps of other cars that do have that safety kit installed. Good luck selling at anything like the price you want without the safety pack.

Consider this: as much as you may believe you’re an excellent driver and don’t need any of the safety nannies, the vast majority of people in the market for a car such as yours are likely to take a very different view. You can never have too much safety equipment in a car you expect to sell some day.

Is your dealer trying to sell you a ‘tech pack’ of features for your Ford Ranger XLT? That might include adaptive cruise control, auto high-beam headlights, self-parking and lane-keeping (also an active safety feature).

These are features that may not appeal much to you, but looking ahead to the vehicle’s second owner, these are precisely the sort of gadgets that will ‘surprise and delight’ a prospective buyer. If the parking assistant actually works without endless mucking around, you might even use it yourself.

Once again though, a tech pack like this (or the features optioned up separately) won’t necessarily add much to the car’s resale value, but it could be harder to sell without the whizz-bang stuff.

It’s a truism of automotive journalism that a press evaluation vehicle from a German prestige brand will never ride on standard wheels. If the standard wheel is 18-inch diameter, the press vehicles will roll on 19-inch alloys.

And why is that? It’s because they look stylish in photos and on video.

An optional 19-inch wheel often brings with it harsher ride quality, as we found with a previous generation of BMW 3 Series a few years back. Plus the bigger wheels generate more road noise and are hamstrung by heavier unsprung weight. There are (miniscule) penalties in performance and fuel economy, and they cost more to replace.

The larger wheel and low-profile tyre combination doesn’t necessarily grip any better than the standard wheel, assuming the tyres supplied are from the same manufacturer and built to a similar specification, actual size nothwithstanding.

But you know what? If you can live with larger wheels and can negotiate a discounted price for them as well, you should probably select them over the standard wheels. The person buying your new car from you a few years from now may not be as discerning or sensible as you are, but gee, those wheels look great, don’t they?

There’s a diverse range of opinions concerning audio/visual entertainment systems in cars – everything on the spectrum from ‘any noise is a distraction’ to ‘I want digital radio and free-to-air TV playing in the car’.

Along the spectrum there are little branchlines of thought, such as the drivers who pine for the days of CD stackers and those who plague their passengers with talkback radio on the AM band.

If there’s one nexus of agreement it centres on the rear-seat entertainment system for kids. A DVD player or a couple of USB ports, plus video screens mounted at the rear of each front-seat headrest all provide hours of entertaining content for the kids in a large family wagon or a sedan like the last of the Holden Caprices – and hours of relief for the parents in the front seats.

There is, however, a widely-held view that these systems are getting long in the tooth, when the kids can also be entertained by an iPad, a USB lead for recharging and a couple of earbuds.

As for other types of premium A/V systems, many people just can’t pick the difference in sound quality between the standard audio system head unit and speakers in a prestige car and the more expensive upgrade with 20 speakers and an amplifier capable of supporting an AC/DC concert.

It’s questionable as to whether the upgraded system will boost the sales appeal of your car, unless the prospective buyer is a real audiophile.

Digital radio may be a valuable feature in future negotiations, however. More consumers seem to be engaging with it for its better sound quality and paucity of advertisements. Increasingly, however, it’s being packaged with the standard audio system in prestige cars.

The end has been predicted for embedded satellite navigation systems for some years now, mainly due to the prevalence of smartphones with GPS guidance facility.

But navigation remains the cornerstone of many infotainment upgrade options in prestige cars. And it’s the sort of gadget you miss in any car that does haven’t it.

What will be a test for in-car sat-nav systems is the rise of smartphones with voice recognition. If the phone is already paired to the vehicle through Bluetooth and can recognise an address you relayed orally, it’s already ahead of many existing in-car systems. You don’t even need Apple CarPlay or Android Auto (see below) for the smartphone to be your guide.

As cars age, and perhaps the mapping data isn’t updated as regularly as it should, the value of the satellite navigation system will diminish. Many of them are already far from user-friendly.

Yet for all that, it’s still a nice-to-have feature you can list when advertising the car for sale.

If there’s ever a case against technology for being a pointless waste of development resources and an on-going irritation to the end user, hands-free control for powered tailgates will be among the very first items admitted into evidence.

Thankfully, it’s always bundled in with powered tailgates, which are undeniably useful and convenient. The better class of powered tailgates can be lowered as well as raised from the switch at the driving position.

It may not add much to your car’s resale value, or make your car stand out among the hundreds of other examples also optioned with the feature, but even as an option costing you extra, it’s money well spent.

What sort of price would you pay for that level of convenience? Enough to offset the cost added to the purchase price, surely...

It’s the latest two-horse race to draw the attention of a world that hasn’t quite moved on yet from cassettes and cartridges, Beta versus VHS.

Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are two forms of smartphone technology that interface the respective control screen and apps from the phone to the car’s infotainment screen. Offering navigation, entertainment and communications in the one portable device, the smartphone can now run many of the disparate functions that were previously hard-wired into the car.

These old infotainment systems have been rendered almost redundant with the arrival of CarPlay and Android Auto. So popular are the new systems with smartphone users (which is most of us these days) that it’s not unreasonable to conclude in-car infotainment will be pared down to just one USB port and a touch screen within a few years.

The question then, is this: Should you pay up for CarPlay and Android Auto if the systems are not provided as standard?

Undeniably. The popularity of smartphones is only going to increase with time, and a used car without CarPlay and Android Auto is bound to be harder to sell in future.