I used this method, and found it quite helpful. Example: a few years ago I bought a new Toyota 4Runner. I used the ‘fax’ method and faxed about a dozen dealers within a 250-mile radius. I told each one specifically what I was looking for, that I had pre-arranged financing and would buy within 2 days (it was also the end of the month). We have two Toyota dealers in Jackson, and they ended up getting in a war over my purchase. The acutal purchase was easy - I walked into the ‘winning’ dealership, handed over the check, executed some paperwork and drove away.
This is how good the deal was: my son totalled the vehicle about 9 months later, and the amount that the insurance company paid me (value of the vehicle) was $3,000 MORE than what I owed on the loan.
I’ve successfuly used their tips and methods for used-car purchases too. The site is worth a read.
Sounds like you haven’t looked at new cars too much. You don’t really get to pick and choose which options you want on the car one-by-one. If everyone got to do that they’d be making made to order custom cars for everyone and you’d probably have to wait months to get yours. (If you really want a pick and choose by option car look at the Scions).
Nowdays, these things are built and sold by trim levels. SE, LE, XE etc. Each level you go up they thrown in more options. Toyotas and Hondas are fairly simple and straight forward this way.
Air conditioning on a sticker will say it’s an option but it’s actually standard. It’s not something they added later, it came from the factory that way. It’s not as if they can just take it off the car.
For used cars, I’ve got one word: CarMax
I’ve bought two vehicles from them. The first was a 2000 Plymouth Voyager, which was purchased in 2002. Since I lived 70 miles away from the dealership, I found what I was looking for on their website, and then arranged all of the financing, extended warranty, etc. online (yes, I bought the extended warranty because I had read excellent reviews of CarMax’s warranty program - which proved to be every bit as good as claimed). A couple of introductory e-mails were exchanged, but I didn’t talk to a salesperson in person until I arrived at the store for a test drive. Thirty minutes later, we were driving away in a slightly-used mini-van (22 months old, and 21k miles). Paid about $14k for it.
Second experience was not unlike the first, and was made in October of this year. The old Voyager was showing its age, and was starting to demand regular repair work, so I decided it was time to look around. I checked with CarMax again, and also on the Bluebook on the Voyager, which ranked around $3500, in excellent condition. Took the Voyager in, had them appraise it while we looked at another vehicle. They offered us $4k for it, which they would have just paid us outright, if we had decided to sell it instead of trade it. We also eventually settled on an '05 Chrysler Town & Country Touring Edition, with everything but leather, including remote electric start and power-assist tailgate and side doors, 6-disc CD changer and two-screen DVD system. Bottom line: 17k miles, and $16,500 (less $4k for the van, so I only financed $12.5k). Another advantage is that I didn’t have to pay anything up-front on the car, which in Missouri is a big deal, because local dealers aren’t able to roll the sales tax into the financing - you have to cough up your 10% (or whatever it is), in 30 days in CA$H.
I’ve used Carmax also and was quite pleased with them. No haggling, no tricky pricing/payments b.s. They don’t even have salesmen! You pretty much go into a location, sit at a computer and browse their inventory by brand/price/style/etc. however you want. Prices are listed directly on the page.
When you see a couple you like it tells you where to find them on the lot so you can go look at them. No employee even approaches you. If you have more questions, or want to see the interior, or want to test drive you just go back inside and grab an employee. If you want to buy the car you just tell them. If not you can keep looking or leave. They don’t really care. If you want to buy it the employee will draw up all the paperwork and do a multi-bank search for loan rates if you need one.
Now I wouldn’t say the vehicles are a steal or the absolute best price you can find, but for no haggle, no worry, no lemon, no rip-off used car buying for the unsavy they run a tight business.
I recently bought a used car and leaned heavily toward buying CarMax for a while. My only hangup was the selection; I didn’t really like what I was seeing for the prices. The employees were very cool though, honest and direct. I didn’t feel at all like they were trying to sweet-talk me or trick me.
I ended up finding a better deal at a tiny used car lot and went with it. Unfortunately, I bought an extended warranty that doesn’t do crap. I’ll be cashing it out this week and going on to Consumer Reports to find something better.
I bought my darling 2000 Honda Civic from CarMax and was very pleased with the entire process. Of course, we’d recently sold a house and I was able to write a check right then and there for the full amount.
My suggestion? Get your financing through your bank or credit union first. Know how much you will pay. Do your research first so you know what kind of car you want.
If anybody makes you wait longer than 10 minutes, leave. DO NOT give them your driver’s license…I believe they use that to run a credit check on you or hold you hostage, I’m not sure which.
It’s a good idea to check out invoice, MSRP and “fair offer” prices on sites like edmunds.com and Kelley Blue Book. My experience on soliciting info/offers from dealerships, though, is that it’s largely futile. Few will actually quote you a price on what you want. The rest are busy trying to get you into the dealership by any means possible, including lying about what’s on their lot and attempting to sell you something different from the vehicle you requested.
You’ll rarely get only the options you want unless you order the car from the factory, and even then sometimes they don’t fill the order accurately.
I have always liked the dealer’s term for the friendly sap who greets you in the lot (or at the door) - the “floor whore”. These people are fine to deal with when you want a test drive or basic info on the car but are irrelevant when it comes to fixing a price. They disappear and Mr. Hard-Nosed Pissant materializes to feed you fake figures and justifications.
Mrs. J.and I have been known to walk away from auto dealerships after a car shopping experience muttering “Unclean, unclean.”
Oh, for sure. Like I said, I had looked up the invoice on mine, so I came in with that number and all of my resulting numbers based off of that. They knew the bottom line price, as well as the monthly payments I was lookin’ for.
If you’re buying from a dealership, and your need for a new car isn’t urgent, you may want to wait until closer to the end of the month. I’ve found car salespeople are more willing to negotiate on price when the need to meet their monthly sales quota is looming over them.
In most cases, it’s a little bit of both. There’s also the whole “if you’re going to test drive, we want to make sure you’re legal to drive” bit. Make sure that, if you do hand over your license, that you get it back. There are lots of people who’ll leave without their license, but there are also some shady dealerships who’ll hold on to your license until you put down a deposit. I don’t work for one, but I’ve seen situations where customers have come in from other dealers in the area who have.
Just be wary of what’s going on and make sure you understand everything that’s going on, including where your keys and license are.
There are (IIRC) three different invoice numbers that are supposedly what the dealer paid for the car. Typically the one the public sees is higher than the actual factory price, so when the dealer says ‘thousands below invoice’ they’re not losing a cent.
It’s thousands below an artificially high invoice that has absolutely nothing to do with how much the dealer pays the maker for the car.
shrug The number I Googled, I suppose. When I Google any particular car, there are tons of websites with two or three different invoice numbers on them- I went off of the lowest for my purchase.
That’s what gets me. If I could start with the wholly imaginary invoice price from, say, Edmunds, add destination and subtract the buyer incentive, the completely unknown factory to dealer incentive, the utterly mysterious holdback, and the totally obfuscated origination fee, I could, in theory, come up with a good idea of what constitutes a reasonable price. Is there any way to find out these factors? Without them, I have four variables. I’d be happy with the real invoice at the point. I think I will try Carmax.
Also, the ‘whip it out’ bit belongs to a coworker, I wish it was one of mine.
Hoo boy, are you right about this. (And Malcom Gladwell covers it in Blink also, where one salesman made a fortune because he didn’t assume a farmer was a hick. The farmer had a ton of money, and bought lots of trucks from him.
After my car got totaled, I decided that my mid-life crisis was going to be coming soon, so a Mustang convertible would be cool. (I’ve driven them for rentals in LA). So, I wandered over to my local Ford dealer. Alas, I was driving the Ford Despair (Aspire) I got as a rental from my insurance company. The sales guys looked at me. I went over the the Mustangs on the lot. No action. I went over to them. They grudgingly were willing to talk to me. I asked about the car. They said it would be a lot of trouble to get it out. Since I’ve gotten better responses from hot girls at mixers when I was in college than I was getting from them, I decided that I didn’t really want to give them my money. I went across the street to the Saturn dealer to replace my old Saturn with a new one. That was ten years ago, I still have it and it’s running great, so good move.
Before that I tried to buy a car from a Ford dealer in Pennsylvania with a bit more conversation, but no more success. No wonder Ford is doing so well.
When my in-laws went to buy their last car, they were told that there was some AAA promotion where they could pay 6% over the invoice price with no negotiation. It sounded like a reasonable deal, but looking over the paperwork, they noticed that one page of the agreement was missing. As a matter of fact, it was the one page with the actual figure of “6%” on it.
After a hour-long discussion on how they wanted to see the number in writing before they signed, as well as a discussion of how a car dealership happens to lose page 2 of the only copy of a 3-page document, the second page was miraculously discovered.
The promotion specifically stated 3% over the invoice price.
I bought a new 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid last month, and am quite happy with it so far. My process consisted of:
(1) I knew I wanted to guy a hybrid
(2) A guy who generally knows what he’s talking about said that if was going to get a car, he’d get the Civic Hybrid
(3) I poked around on CarsDirect.com and it ended up telling me that a good actual price to pay would be something like $23,500
(4) I considered whether I should hire one of those fancy pants website places that do all the negotatiation for you, etc.
(5) First, however, I figured I’d go into the dealership and tell them I wanted to buy the car and would pay $22,000
(6) So the salesman came up and started doing all his usual rigamarole, never naming a price, etc. I said “look, I will pay $22,000 right now and buy a car. If you can’t make that deal, I’ll go and do a lot of research and see if I can find a great deal.” (His original offer was in the 27,000 range)
(7, 8, 9, 10) He kept asking irrelevant questions and coming back with different numbers and talking about things like dealer invoices, and I kept repeating my statement
(11) He and another guy finally tag-teamed me up to $22,600
(12) I drove off in the car the next day
Since then, I’ve been wondering if I could have started at $21,000 and driven off at 21,600, but I’ve poked around on various places like Edmunds.com, and it definitely still seems like I got a very good deal.
Also, I kind of enjoyed the part where he kept coming back and launching into some tangent, and then I said “you know, that’s very interesting, but I just don’t care. So, will you take my deal?”. It gave me quite a feeling of power.
This is how my wife and I make pretty much every major purchase, from cars to scalped basketball tickets. Two heads are better than one.
“How to buy a car” is something to which innumerable internet sites are dedicated, but unless you’re doing Internet buying, you can’t really go wrong if you just do five basic things:
Research the cars before you visit the lots.
Work with a partner if at all possible.
Negotiate on price, not monthly payments.
Drive the car as much as possible; maybe even rent one or two if you get the chance.
Don’t buy the car on your first visit to a dealer.
I love car shopping! The last two times my parents have looked at cars, they have insisted that I go along. This is how it goes: They poke around the lot beforehand, and pick out something that they like, and bring me back the brochure. I then read the brochure, assuming that it isn’t one I picked up at the NAIAS (North American International Auto Show) the last time around. We all troop off to the car dealership. The salesperson, understandably, ignores me and talks instead to my dad, or, if he is feeling particularly generous, my mom as well. Until I start answering all the questions about which features are available on which model, etc. whenever he says he doesn’t know, or gives incorrect information.
You should see the looks on these guys faces when a college-age FEMALE out-does them on car knowledge. Makes me giggle just thinking about it.
I like having lived next to a car dealership owner, and working for a year and a half at a different car dealership. I was a receptionist, so I wasn’t pure sales evil.
When I needed a car two months ago, I went in to the dealership I used to work at, walked past the sales guys, smiled winningly, and said, “I’m just here to see Lee.” I’d mess around with the new ones, but I just can’t bring myself to take up their time, I’ve seen how much time sales guys spend at work not making money. Their dejection, however, is funny, when they find out I’m not even looking to buy (from them). I walked up to Lee, he flattered me, I gave him shit, he told me I looked hot, I told him I dressed up with cleavage so he’d give me a good deal, and he said it worked (he’s a dirty old man of the most amusing sort). I looked at two used cars in my price range with a nice, as-honest-as-they-come sales guy I’d worked with for a year and a half, we had a laugh, and I caught up with a bunch of people I used to work with.
I’ve had my share of horror stories, though, because the last time I looked at a car, I was bent on looking around, and I was a 20-year-old female on my own. “oh, you’re looking for a small used car with good gas mileage, manual, newer, nice interior?” “howsabout this beat-up old automatic big SUV that just needs a bit (lot) of reconditioning?” Howsabout I leave? Oh, you’re saying at a KIA dealership, I could only possibly afford your base model without air conditioning? You’re a twit, and I just wanted to see a KIA in person anyway. No, I don’t want to test drive your POS. No, you can’t have my information. No, you can’t do the testdrive with me, I babysat the guy who hired the guy who hired you’s kids. No, you can’t run the numbers for me. Actually, just… NO.
