Our trusty 16-year-old SUV is unfortunately ready to be replaced, as the rust spots have gotten large enough for me to put my hand through, and the number of creaks and groans and various things going wrong have made us hesitant to take it much outside of the city limits. The last time we bought a car, we lived in an urban area with plenty of dealers and such to choose from, and could easily shop around.
Nowadays, we’re in a small town, with exactly one dealer for the type of vehicle we want to buy, and that dealer does not have a great reputation. There’s also this thing called “the internet”, on which I hear you can shop for cars.
We’re going to go with new, as we do tend to keep vehicles for a long time (see above) and so far my search for a low-mileage used vehicle of the types we want has not turned up anything worthwhile.
So how do I do this? Is there a web site that will let me send out for bids on the type of car I want? Am I stuck with the local dealer? I can definitely pick up the phone and start calling all the dealers within a few hundred miles, but I’d rather not if there’s a more efficient way.
You can use Edmunds.com or cars.com to research vehicles. Once you narrow down what you want, use Edmunds new car data to see what they suggest is a fair price - what they call “true market value”. The other good site to see what a good price should be is truecar.com.
Beyond those sources, once you have a brand in mind do an internet search for “Mazda no haggle price dealers”, for example, and see if you can find any dealers who post realistic prices online. There is one dealer in PA and MD - fitzmall.com - that posts very reasonable prices on their website.
Like you, I live in a rural area where there are few competing dealers, but I’ve used these prices to persuade my local dealer to get realistic with pricing. I’ll hint, or outright tell them that I am willing to drive a bit to save money if they won’t meet or come close to prices I’ve found online. For the last five cars we’ve bought, our local dealers came down to the fitzmall price, or close. The one time the dealer wouldn’t, we drove two hours and bought from Fitzgerald. I’m not willing to drive four hours round trip to save $200, but I will for, say, $1,000.
Don’t know about any websites, but calling dealers within X miles seems like a relatively efficient way to go about it; I would expect that in half an hour you could come up with quotes from five different dealers.
You might also check out the websites for those dealers; some of them have mechanisms for requesting a quote.
I would expect you would waste a lot of time, hear a lot of “when can you come in and talk about your needs” and never get any real quotes.
Yes, this can work. I’ve done that and gotten reasonable price quotes about a third of the time. The other two-thirds, I get emails back that say “call me at xxx-xxxx to schedule a time to come in and test drive a car”, but never get a price quote. Make sure to set up a special free email account for this purpose, though. I set one up and am still getting numerous emails weekly from dealers I contacted three years ago. I only look at this email account about once a month, and quickly go through and delete the messages.
Are you a member of a credit union? Many have car buying services. I’ve seen ads on TV for truecar.com which is another service like Edmonds or cars.com.
Costco has car buying services and I believe Sams Club does as well.
The real key is figuring out how much room for negotiation there really is with whatever particular car you’re looking at. With some fast-selling cars, there simply isn’t a whole lot and you can expect to pay relatively close to MSRP. On others that tend to languish in dealer inventories, there’s lots of room and you can expect to be able to dicker them down to near or even below the factory invoice price. (Which is supposedly what the dealer pays for the car, but in practice the dealer usually gets it for cheaper or has various incentives so if you buy the car for invoice price they’re still usually making some money.)
TrueCar’s main feature is the thing where it reports what people are actually paying for a car. I’d take the actual numerical values it gives with a grain of salt, but it’s a good starting point for sussing out whether the specific car you’re looking at is a hot seller or not. I believe Edmunds, Cars.com, et al also have similar features (and list things like average time on the lot for certain models which can be helpful) but they’re more buried in the site.
IMO, the pre-negotiated price services like Costco offers are good if you are interested in a car that’s a pretty fast seller. They usually give you a price that’s similar to what you’d get if you do the bare minimum of dickering. With cars that aren’t fast sellers, though, you can usually do better negotiating on your own. At least jumping through the hoops to figure out what the pre-negotiated price is can be a useful too, even if you do end up just doing a deal on your own.
IME, if you push them most dealers will give you some sort of “quote” but actually nailing them down on an out-the-door price over the phone or e-mail is frustratingly difficult. Practically impossible if financing or a trade in are involved. I think it can be a useful exercise just in terms of making contact with various dealers to feel them out, but as a direct price comparison tool it’s not very useful because you really have no idea what sorts of fees and such they’re going to spring on you once you come in. Yes, we should all walk out of the office as soon as they start tacking those fees on but unfortunately in reality most people don’t once they’re that far along in the process.
I’ve bought two cars in the last five or so years, basically using cars.com. I just kept searching for a week or two for the exact car I wanted to get a sense of the “internet prices” that some dealers would offer. One time I emailed a few dealers asking for quotes but ended up going with the Internet price offered on cars.com. The second time I just found a price on cars.com that was about $1,000 lower than I was expecting to pay after my research.
Both times I was preapproved from my credit union. Both times the dealers beat the interest rate I had in hand.
Both times I checked out car buying services from my credit union. Both times the prices were about $1,500 more than I ended up paying.
I believe car dealers have much less haggling room on sales prices due to Internet shopping, so I think they have gotten very aggressive in dealing with trade-ins to make up profit. That’s just a WAG though.
That is definitely true, especially lately with relatively high used car prices which allow for some pretty big margins on reselling the trade-ins. The usual funny business with financing, extended warranties and the true-coat and all that are still there too of course.
The thing that’s irritating about the pricing situation as it stands now is that often your local dealer would be perfectly happy to sell you a car at the “internet price” the big volume dealer out in the boonies has listed, but so many of dealers are still clinging to the whole “ask high, barter down” model. I usually at least give the local folks a chance to match a price before doing an out-of-town deal.
I just went through that at our local Honda dealer. My wife bought a new Honda and I negotiated down from the dealer’s first offer, which was at MSRP minus a few hundred dollars. I spent some time on Edmunds and truecar, and also got some prices by email from a couple of dealers on the internet. I told the dealer that he would have to do better and made an offer at a price that was in line with what my research told me should be doable. After the salesman did one round-trip back to the manager, I politely asked if the manager could come out so we could get to the bottom line. The manager was very friendly and pretty quickly came down to a reasonable number that I could live with, and that I wouldn’t have to drive an hour or two away to try and beat.
Fast forward about six months, and my wife’s brother wanted the same vehicle. We went in and started up again. When the salesman came back with the unrealistic figure, I asked to see the manager. When he came out and saw me, he started smiling and we got to a good number in about a minute. We talked for a bit, and he grinned and conspiratorially told me he starts at a number not much lower than MSRP because they actually make some sales at this number, and a lot more at a few hundred under that. He said there are buyers who think they are getting a good deal if they pay under MSRP, and a lot more who are happy if they can get another hundred or two off.
He said people who do some research (like me) do quite a bit better, but he wants to make as much money for himself, his store and his salesmen as possible, so long as buyers are happy when they leave. He admitted he will come down to a “good” price that compares with what people find on the internet to keep sales volumes high, but obviously wants to sell cars at higher prices. I understand that from a business standpoint, and I harbor no ill will and am willing to play the game.
I signed up to look around on truecar. com and it was a big mistake. I started getting phone calls and emails from dealers all over the place who urged to me come in RIGHT NOW and do the deal.
Maybe if you open a fake email account and sign in using a fake name, address and phone number you’ll be able to avoid that, but as far as I’m concerned using truecar is just inviting high-pressure sales tactics to come right into your home.
Thanks for posting this. I’m planning on a new car as soon as the 2016 Toyotas come out in August, so I’ll certainly not go on truecar.com or any others yet.
Whether the OP plans on ordering a vehicle or buying off the lot is an important element.
Last year I bought my new Vette off the lot rather than ordering. It’s a high demand product but the longer one has been sitting on the lot the more motivated the dealer will be.
I searched dealers within 250 miles via Autotrader or a model that had all the features I wanted. Then I was able to download the invoices from the dealers who had the models I wanted. I did all my negotiating via email and fax. When I had my rock bottom price for the model I wanted, I once again challenged every dealer to meet or beat it. The fat, drunk, and stupid dealers in Milwaukee thought I wouldn’t go a lousy 90 miles down to the flatlands to save $1300. They were wrong!
I showed up at a dealership in Villa Park, Il with the invoice, their emailed offer, and a check. Boom! Got my price for my car with about 2 hours work on the computer.
If you do this, make sure they aren’t going to try to screw you by saying you don’t qualify for certain rebates because you don’t live where you’re buying the car.
Any dealer screws with you over anything immediately walk the hell out.
To get their pricing estimates (which I think is the most useful part of the site) you don’t need to sign up. But, yeah, that’s another drawback of giving any of your contact info to anyone involved in car sales. My “straight to trash” filter list in my e-mail has a longgggg list of car dealers I e-mailed once about some car or other and kept getting junk from.
I just bought a car last week (VW Golf GTI) using Consumer Reports car buying service - which runs off trueservices quotes, but didn’t get overwhelmed with offers or anything - i was able to go to the point of seeing what the Truecar estimate was, and one more click would take me to which dealers were offering those prices, but until I was ready and clicked that last button I didn’t get pestered. And even then it just gave me three dealers, and that proved pretty manageable. The dealer I wanted wasn’t offering the best price, but when I asked them if they would match the best estimate, they did. Overall, a very stress free, positive experience.
I checked with my credit union and shopped on-line.
I looked at the websites of three dealers near me. I knew approximately what brand and model I wanted to buy, and was deciding between new or used, and/or how used.
Eventually, I stalked their ‘certified pre-owned’ (CPO) vehicles until I saw a couple I was interested in. I emailed to get pricing (easy- no haggle) and scheduled a test drive.
I know there’s probably not a CarMax in the OP’s area, but I’ve found this to be a great way to cut those shenanigans out. Get their price quote on the trade-in, and then do your math on what the dealer offers you as a trade-in if they sweeten the pot with better financing. If not, then just sell the car to CarMax, and take the money and put it as a down payment.