The price of a second-hand car in Japan

22 Jul 2025 | #car | #japan | #money

So we recently bought a second-hand minivan. I thought the price of the car will be simple: there might be some negotiation, but otherwise it should be a simple number, right? Well, it’s more complicated.

Looking at a listing, it already has two prices:

In this case the listing says:

• 車両価格 (vehicle price): 239万円 (2.39M yen)
• 諸費用 (other charges): 10.2万円 (102,000 yen)
• 支払総額 (total payment): 249.2万円 (2,492,000 yen)

So you’d expect to pay the “total payment” number, right? Except when we called them, the store sent us the following estimate:

It seems that the total payment listed on the website is the absolute minimum that you have to pay to drive the car off. In reality there are various additional fees for services that the dealership recommends (and most people take), so they include them in the first estimate. Some of these services make sense (e.g. setting up the ETC card reader), some can be skipped (e.g. getting a license plate with a number of your choice), and some are pretty expensive: the majority of that 170k charge is a 152,200 yen coating.

Sidenote: we also got a quote for a Honda Freed where the price went from 2,339,000 yen (total payment) to 2,732,290 yen, so the Voxy was pretty good.

In the end we dropped the coating (152,200 yen), the custom license plate (6,930 yen), the garage certificate handling (18,700 yen) - this is to ask the police to come and confirm that you have a parking spot (but our police is pretty close, so we can just ask them ourselves).

The one extra thing that we added was a set of new tires: generally tires are replaced every 5 years, so our car still had the original tires. The sales guy said that it is likely enough to replace them next year at shaken(the mandatory vehicle inspection done every 2 years), but there were some small cuts on them. Also these are summer tires, and not suitable for ski trips. So we decided to have them replaced now, and got new four-season tires for 130,000 yen (which was actually the most expensive tire they had on the list, but the cheapest one was still 110,000 yen).

We also tried to negotiate, but the sales guy said that the price is fixed, and wouldn’t budge even on the options (although the options were already pretty minimal). We also asked if they could include the next shaken (the mandatory vehicle inspection done every 2 years), as it is coming up a year from now (August 2026), but he also said no to that. (They usually charge 100-150k yen for that, so would have been a good deal to have it included.) The only place he gave us a discount was the tire, where he dropped the installation fee (normally 13,000 yen).

So with all of this, in the end we are paying 2,602,620 yen for the car. For a 4 year old minivan with 22k km on the clock with no accident history, I think we got a pretty good deal.