Inductively, this makes no sense to me.
Does Saturn have a $3,500 per car cost advantage over Toyota? Don’t think so. The actual selling price of a Saturn vs a comparably equipped discounted Toyota are comparable.
For this statement to be true, the combination of Saturn overpricing vs Toyota (if any) + any cost advantage (if any) would have to add to $3,500 which seems very hard to believe.
CR is the source I got the number from. You read it.
Believe it, or don’t believe it. Makes no difference to me. But, Saturns are made with lower quality parts, lower standards of fit and finish (hence less labor), and are smaller than Toyota’s of comparable price. Ask any former Saturn salesman. Or, just get Consumer Reports’ invoice pricing on a Saturn and compare it to the sticker.
I DO have a Saturn. I still hated the process, though my problems were with my bank, not with the dealership. I went there partly because I knew I’d be treated decently, which I was. I’m overdue for an oil change and need to see if I can transfer my free oil change deal to here…if I can’t, I’ll go where my parents take their cars.
And my car is six years old and running beautifully. I’ve rarely heard a horror story about a Saturn, though I’ll admit I’ve heard a few.
If I need to haggle over a car, my mom’s husband LOVES to do that, so I’ll let him do it for me. Maybe it IS buying into the stereotype, but I don’t care what the gender of the haggling person is as long as they can do it. I can’t.
I worked with a couple Toyota dealerships getting my Echo and take it to a third. Always good parts, always good service, and tolerable salesmen. No complaints here.
I think we’re just going to disagree on this one.
I test drove a Honda Civic last week. Then the guy pulls up a fom on his screen and starts doing the math.
He puts in 3500 for my 2 yr old Hyandai, and he’ll give me 1000 off the price of the car because it’s “so new”. The final price is something like $12,000.
I said I want mor for my tradein, he says no problem, he change the 3500 to 4000, then he goes up to the 1000 discount and changes that to 500, end result is the car would cost me $12,000.
Hello? He just juggled the numbers right in front of me, didn’t do anything. Maybe there’s some difference in tax reasons on a trade-in or something that I’mnot aware of, but there was no real difference I saw. He thought I didn’t see it. If I can get 0% financing I’ll go back.
Why would the quality of the service department be of any relevance when buying a car? If a place has a good service department, you can take your car there no matter where you bought it from.
Yes, dealers are now required by the manufacturers to perform the minimal warranty service requirements to any vehicle that they service that is still under warranty regardless of where it was purchased. However, at least where I worked, (a competitive sales market) many dealers will not give aftersale “freebies,” reduced cost extras and preferential treatment to folks who didn’t buy their cars at the servicing dealership. YMMV.
For example: you may not get a free loaner car when the warranty does not provide for rental reimbursement. The manufacturer almost never provides for rental reimbursement if your car does not require an overnight stay and overnight stays are increasingly rare these days. However, the servicing dealer may provide you with a free loaner even if the vehicle doesn’t require an overnight stay as long as you purchased the car from him.
You may have to arrange and wait for for a rental and then get reimbursed rather than just “sign and drive” an onsite loaner if you didn’t buy the car from the servicing dealer.
When a part you need for a recall is on national backorder, you may not be placed near the front of the queue when that part starts trickling off backorder if you didn’t purchase the car from the servicing dealer.
When a highly reputable shop is overloaded, which is not at all uncommon, (and not a testament to poor quality. Many consumers who keep their cars long term actually have all the recommended maintenance done by a dealer at the recommended intervals) and that shop is not taking appointments for a week or more, you will most likely not get an appointment the same day you call from a non-selling dealer.
Manufacturers will just about never reimburse for a rental needed because of shop overload even if your car is not driveable. The selling dealer may bail you out in such a case.
When your car is out of warranty but not grossly and you need an expensive repair, the non-selling dealer is extremely unlikely to burn a “get out of jail free” card for you. Your dubious warranty claims will be viewed with greater scrutiny.
You probably won’t get free wiper blade replacements and such.
There are a bazillion little (and sometimes great) rare (and not so rare) things a service department can do for you that are not required under warranty. If the service department is in a competitive sales market, the sales department will oftentimes dangle these goodies as sales bait and can require the service department to withhold these desireables from buyers who bought elsewhere. This practice allows the dealer to add aftersale value only to his auto sales customers and therefore discourage the very practice you mention.
Some customers are willing to pay a little extra for the local availability of these extras while others will buy from that local “service supremacy” dealer instead of a run-of-the-mill dealer if the price is essentially the same. Some see the price difference as trivial, especially when the life of the car or at least the length of the warranty is concerned. Others do not see any value at all. YMMV
I have egregiously yet unintentionally hijacked this thread and I apologise to all who will ever read it.
If anyone has any questions regarding my posts in this thread, kindly email me and I will try to respond quickly. I will stop pouring gasoline on this fire by no longer responding to quotes of my posts in this thread.
Back to the OP
My admitedly limited experience is backed by Consumer Reports, which has listed Toyota dead last, and significantly so in terms of “satisfaction with the deal” over the past decade or so. Not to mention several local Newspaper articles showing local Toyota dealers being Indited. Year after year, they are dead last and significantly worse than others. Saturn usually rates the highest, although sometimes it is merely in the top 3.
Again, Toyota does make a good car. It’s the salesmen & dealers who are the scam artists.
I’ll get my latest CR out to refute Davebear.
Last summer I was inexplicably stricken with the urge to buy a car. I’ve never owned a car in forty-whatever years on this earth (life-long NYC resident). But for some reason I felt like I should have one all of a sudden.
So I did some homeword. Consumer Reports, other sources, friends who owned various makes and models, about everything I could think of. I settled on a Toyota Echo as the car for me. Small (and thus easier to park), cheap, good mileage, good reliability. It was all very rational. I figured out which options I wanted (none except air-conditioning). I didn’t care what color the car came in.
Armed with CR’s excellent reports (which include the invoice price of the car), I went down to my local Toyota dealer.
What a nightmare. First, I discovered that dealers really, really don’t like to sell you a car without loads of options. It took nearly half an hour to convince the salesman that I did not want or need an automatic transmission. Then he started on the floor mats, which cost some ridiculous amount of money. I didn’t want them either. There was all kinds of crap. I can’t even remember what options he tried to convince me I needed.
So, OK, we get past that, and the salesman finally admits that yes, there is such a thing as a two-door Echo with manual transmission and without floor mats and special carpeting and what have you. Now we’re down to talking about price.
So he says “how much do you want to pay per month?” I respond that I’m going to pay cash for the car.
You would have thought I’d offered to service his mother sexually for a small fee. I could practically see the blood draining from his face. Ignorant as I am, I had not realized that dealers make pretty good money financing cars, and they don’t ever want anyone to pay cash, ever, under any circumstances.
He really wouldn’t take the cash. We went back and forth for a while on this, and I ended up just leaving. I could see no reason why I should be paying interest on a loan I didn’t want and didn’t need, so I just left.
The urge to purchase a car passed very quickly.
Funny thing – by the end of the week, the sales manager of the dealership called me up (I’d made the mistake of giving them my phone number) and said that OK, they’d sell me the car I wanted at the price I’d offered, for cash. I admit I got a bit of a sadistic kick out of telling him that I’d changed my mind and that I didn’t want a car anymore, mostly because of the hassles I’d gone through at his dealership.
So there’s my car-buying story.
So, here is the answer to Davebear. From CR Feb2002, Toyota Camry XLE: “Price as tested”= $29,909, “CR Wholesale price”= $25,840. A difference (Mark up)of $4,069. Not even close to $1500- although it isn’t TOO far from the $5000 Davebear claimed Saturn made on each car.
From CR Mar2003 Saturn Ion3: “price as tested”= $17,565, “CR Wholesale Price”= $15,759. A difference (mark up) of $1,611. Not even close to $5000- although, oddly it IS close to the $1500 figure that Davebear claimed was the “industry average”. (Hmm, did he just get the numbers reversed?)
Now the Camry is a more expensive car than the Ion so the “mark up” should be larger, but more expensive cars also tend to have a smaller mark up as a %. So the % mark up is: Toyota= 115.74% Saturn= 110.22% Toyota has an extra 5% mark up in there.
Saturn has clearly & significantly smaller “mark ups” than Toyota, at least on the two cars, and based upon my general reading in the field. I am sorry, but there are the numbers.
Every car-buying experience I’ve ever had has left me with a bad taste of some kind. Even though I do research in advance, there’s always a twist that gets thrown in. The latest little trick that the dealer played on me was when I bought a '98 Toyota 4Runner “LTD”. I got a great price, but later found out that the VIN was for a SR5 model…which is worth about $800 less.
DrDeth -
I believe you may be incorrectly interpreting what the terms “price as tested” and “CR Wholesale Price” imply. They are not necessarily related in any way, nor do they reflect a price “markup”.
For example, a vehicle’s “Wholesale Price” may be 15,000 but the manufacturers rarely deliver the base model which costs 15K to the publication for testing so therefore the vehicle tested typically involves a significantly higher priced option package and thus may be priced at 21,000.
Of course, I could be wrong - it has happened once before. 
MeanJoe: I do believe DrDeth has it right. The CR Wholesale Price is Consumer Reports’ best estimate of the actual dealer cost, including “dealer invoice, holdback, and any incentives and rebates.” The CR Wholesale Price is given for a particular car, with price of options, if any, figured in. The “price as tested”, I think, is what Consumer Reports actually paid the dealer for their car. They take pains to purchase their test cars “over the counter”, so to speak, rather than accept cars directly from the manufacturers. That way CR knows they’re not getting a car that’s been specially cleaned up and debugged just for their magazine.
So the difference between the two would be a measure of actual dealer markup (although, admittedly, only for the particular car CR bought at the particular dealer they bought it at).