I’ve bought books, CDs, dowloaded music, ordered flowers, even some small electronics (hello iPod mini) online, but a car? That is just a different order of magnitude.
But I’m looking at a deal on Carsdirect.com that looks real good!
Anyone have experiences buying cars online they’d like to share. Is it as simple as it looks? What’s the deal with financing? Can they be trusted?
Back in 2000 I bought a new Toyota Celica GT-S through Carsdirect.com and had no problems at all. I also financed it online (don’t remember from who) and had no problems with that.
I got a pretty good deal on the car. I could probably have gotten just as good a deal (or better) if I wanted to do the legwork of going from dealer to dealer but I hate dealing with them. I did go to 1 or 2 to do a test drive and see what price I could get and CarsDirect had them beat.
Basically CarsDirect found the car I wanted and let me know where to pick it up, which was a local dealer. I got all the paper work they sent me together and went to the dealer. Checked out the car, took a test drive, signed a bunch of forms, and then drove the car home. Pretty painless and I didn’t have to haggle over prices with the dealer or any of that nonsense. This was all pretty new at the time and the dealer had never done an online transaction but I got CarsDirect on the phone and they took care of everything.
This was 4 years ago and I don’t know how service is now but back then CarsDirect was friendly and helpful. If you call them I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to answer any specific questions you might have about the process.
Good luck!
Thanks bafaa.
Turns out the “direct purchase” option is not available for my car/region/whatever, so I am being referred to a local dealer. That’s fine, but it just means I’ll have to haggle some.
I was just sort of looking forward to the thrill of spending thousand$ online!