Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Up to 20,000 additional Certificates of Entitlement (COEs) will be progressively injected across all vehicle categories from February 2025. Why is the government making this move and will this bring COE premiums down?
Steven Chia and Crispina Robert speak to Walter Theseira from the Singapore University of Social Sciences and Arthur Wong, managing director of ACM Automobiles.
Here’s an excerpt from the conversation:
Walter Theseira, transport analyst:
If you look at what LTA’s objective is in this, their objective is not to target a certain price level. Their objective is to try to stabilise the COE supply, to undo some of this boom-and-bust cycle we have, because that is not very good for the economy – to have this extreme swing in prices and COE supply.
With all these swings in pricing, you induce a lot of behaviour from car buyers, businesses and so on, to try to time the market, to try to second guess what’s going to happen.
I don’t think that makes a lot of sense. So the objective is to stabilise (the) supply. But if they wanted to do that, my opinion would be (that) it would be more sensible for them to target the earlier part of 2025, 2026 to inject most of the supply, because that is when stabilisation makes a big difference.
Steven Chia, host:
When you say stabilise, is there any indication of what kind of pricing would be considered stable, because ironically, the S$100,000 mark is something people have almost gotten used to, in a strange way. And one could say that’s kind of stable in a crazy way.
Arthur Wong:
As a car enthusiast, I hope it will come down, but it’s anybody’s guess.
I hope it comes down. We’re always guessing among our people in the trade: “Next week will go up? No, nobody is buying cars, so it should come down,” and it goes up. Then, there was this period (where) all of a sudden, it dropped down to S$85,000 …
Steven:
There’s no way to really predict it. What would be considered in this day and age now, a fair price where people will say: “Okay, that makes sense.”?
Arthur:
We had a good run during the 2018 and 2019 period, all the way up to the 2020s … S$30,000. Those were the best days.
A new episode of Deep Dive drops every Friday. Follow the podcast on Apple or Spotify for the latest updates.
Have a great topic for us? Drop the team an email at cnapodcasts [at] mediacorp.com.sg