I haven’t shopped for a lower-end used car in a long, long time, and I’d forgotten how excruciatingly tedious and annoying it is. Especially here, where candidates are anywhere in a 50-mile radius of small roads.
It would be a full pitting to go into individual sellers who don’t seem to actually want to sell their cars and thus don’t return email or phone messages, can’t seem to make a spot in their busy schedule to show the car, answer any meaningful questions even having owned it since new, etc. So I won’t do that here.
Almost makes used car dealerships more attractive, don’t it? I hate the bastards too but at least they have posted hours of operations and salesmen standing by.
I usually find shopping for cars to rank somewhere between gall bladder surgery and an IRS audit, but last spring, when my wife needed a new car, we had a truly painless experience.
She found a car she wanted (on ebay!) at a local dealer, and I emailed him, and told him that were weren’t interested in haggling, that we wanted his best out-the-door price, and that we were going to pay cash. He e-mailed my back with a spreadsheet listing the price of the car, all the paperwork and taxes. We drove down to the dealership, test drove the car, and bought it - at the price he quoted. Totally painless.
This was at a Mercedes-Benz dealer, but the car was a Jetta (and cheap!). The dealer is part of the Pensky network.
The hardest part was wandering around the showroom, looking at all the cars that cost more than my first house…
Ended up finding a nice Subaru, all of the 'spensive 100k work done, good for the next 100k with routine maint, for a fair price. But *wow *did it take a lot of time and driving around and general hassle.
If you’re happy with the price you paid, then there’s nothing to complain about, just as you say. I do want to mention, though, that these days it’s neither arduous nor expensive to do the research that lets you go in and tell the dealer how much you’ll be paying for the car, rather than the other way around.