Why don't US car ads tell you the price?

So the wife’s at work, the daughter’s with the grandparents and it’s just me and my son in the house. Great, I’ll be able to watch the cricket. Unfortunately New Zealand won early (by 8 wickets, nice!) so I thought I’d watch an NFL game.

Every commercial break was dominated by car ads, which prominently display the monthly payments, interest rates and all sorts of cash back deals but not a single one of the dozen or so I saw even hinted at the price of the car. Hell even an ad for an iphone through one of the mobile providers was all about the zero dollars down deal without once saying what the phone costs. Is this usual in the US?

While some car ads here go for a ‘high’ concept approach most put the price frontand centre. Why the coyness in the US ads?

The price varies by region. People don’t realize the difference in cost between living in high priced areas of the US like New York or San Fran, and living in lower cost areas.
Also, the price is going to change due to different levels of taxation in different States/localities.

Americans insist on buying and selling cars the way they did horses, with lots of bluffing and negotiation. The dealers have dozens of games they can play with “dealer cost,” various add-ons and mandatory fees, trade-in value, and monthly payment, and so the cost of a vehicle may easily be 15 percent more to any buyer too weary to play the games required.

There have been occasional experiments with fixed-price dealerships and one entire make (Saturn), but Americans always think they can negotiate a better deal than almost every other consumer that day, so the industry stays tethered to this frustrating game that’s rigged for the dealers, at the expense of both salesmen and consumers.

I hadn’t considered the variations in sales taxes and the like. What sort of differences are we talking about, 5-10% or more?

I must also confess to never having bought a new car (or any car from a dealer for that matter), but my impression here is that the advertised price is pretty much what you’ll walk away paying, unless you also opt for some sort of extended maintenance or warranty.

Oh how I hate the car-buying game! It’s stupid and it makes no sense, but it’s the system we’re apparently stuck with. Even places that say “The price you see is the price you pay” will play games if you have a trade-in.

I learned years ago that if you get up and head for the door, things suddenly start going your way. We were about to lease a car (one of my husband’s less stellar ideas) and the monthly cost was outside our budget. The salesman kept trying to cajole us into paying more, as if we were holding out, but we flat-out didn’t have the extra. So I stood up and started for the door, when suddenly, he decided to “talk to the manager” and the lease payment came down. When that happened, a lightbulb went off in my head, and our future vehicle purchases went much better. (purchases, not lease. Never leased again - that was a BAD choice for us. Within a year, we got a loan from our credit union and bought the car we were leasing, and literally drove it till it fell apart in a parking lot.)

The last car we bought, we’d done our research on the vehicle we wanted and our trade. We decided to make it happen, they’d have to take our old car and a set amount of cash. I told the salesguy “I won’t write a check for more than $XXXX” and his “manager” came back with a bottom line that was $1 less than I’d said. :smiley: It may have helped that it was the last day of the month and they needed to make a quota or something. But we got what we wanted and I know they made their profit, so it worked.

I dread the next purchase, but it’s at least 2 years off, maybe farther.

A lot of new car dealers advertise their lease prices instead of purchase. So the monthly payment is all that matters since you aren’t sctually buying the car.

I see a lot of commercials that give the MSRP, usually along the lines of ‘Buy the new [Car name], starting at [price].’

Car dealers love people who believe this to be the case. There are some dealers who won’t negotiate: Honda is notorious for this, and I’ll never buy another one. But most will play the game. MSRP is a suggested price, not a firm price. The object is to get the price down as close to factory invoice as possible.

While taxes will differ according to location, they have nothing to do with the sticker price. Tax and license costs are added after the price is negotiated. Cost to ship the vehicle from the factory is the same everywhere. Demand for a particular model may drive prices, if availability is limited, but that’s not common for cars that the general public can afford.

I never thought about the differences in regional pricing of cars before. So, just for kicks, I looked up the lowest price available for a new, bare bones Honda Civic on cars.com. The general idea is that what dealers list a car for on cars.com is probably pretty close to their final price. Here’s what I found:

DC area: $16,000
New York City area: $17,100
Los Angeles area: $18,900
Boise area: $19,200
Houston area: $18,000
Wichita, KS area: $19,100
Chicago area: $17,000

I had no idea that prices could vary by almost 20%, even in major cities around the country.

Most car ads I’ve seen recently have MSRP somewhere, but only prominently if the car is a price leader in the category and that’s a major selling point.

The most basic reason ads don’t include prices is because it’s unnecessary to achieve the purpose of the ad, and pricing is a divisive element. Some viewers will think it’s too cheap (and thus “too cheap”), some will think it’s too expensive, and almost no one will run to the store because of a price. So it’s best to leave it out and let SeeWant continue unfettered to the moment of Buy, at which point the price is largely irrelevant.

I’d love to see the evidence that Americans demand this system. Dealers love it because they and their salesmen have far more experience exploiting it, and because most people don’t make more than token efforts at bargaining.

I’d happily use a straightforward new car pricing system that did away with all the discounted-below-MSRP nonsense, plus a trade-in system keyed to an accepted used-car handbook (like KBB). Can’t see it happening anytime soon though.

People are interested in how much car they can afford. And when they think about “affordability”, they’re not thinking “$18,000 total cost”, they’re thinking “$299/month.”

It the same thing when you walk into a dealership and the salesperson asks you what you were thinking about in terms of payments.

(quote broked agin, gardamit)

The sales process for cars is a chicken-and-egg situation that either side could change if they really wanted to. Some makers/dealers/services have gone to flat pricing, but it’s not universally accepted because American buyers are convinced it hides excess profit for the seller that they, smart Yankee horsetrader stock that they are, could eliminate.

But you’re right, in its present form, it serves dealers very well by allowing them to play the endless games with pricing and add-ons and so forth. The only real solution (short of trying to legislate flat pricing, which even I think would be a disaster and governmentally intrusive) is to educate the car-buying population into the kind of sense no one should drive past a dealership without (homework, homework, homework!) - and then start demanding flat pricing or we’ll go buy from someone who does.

But it’s a juggernaut with about as much inertia as the Moon, and even a dedicated effort is likely to take decades and probably break up on the rocks of advantageous (to the dealers) and “necessary” (to the buyers) tradition.

In addition to what’s already been said, another aspect is that the typical US car dealer can have several hundred vehicles in stock, most/all bought via floorplan financing. It’s in their best interest to get those cars sold ASAP so they can make their payments. They want to get shoppers into the building and talking to a salesperson instead of them sitting at home and shopping online.

I can see by this list the demand factor. In LA, Boise or Wichita, a car is pretty essential, but in DC, NYC or Chicago, people can probably get by without one for the most part.

The difference in price is only a part of it. Local car dealers often used to give prices (with disclaimers). But the prices are so high that they are afraid it will scare customers away, so they emphasized the cost of a lease.

I think it’s more complex than that. For one thing, listings on Cars.com have a certain… gray market? shady? illusory? cast to them and may not be all that representative of actual driveaway pricing.

No question that prices vary by region. But the reasons, and the actual variance in sticker, and the actual out-the-door price, are almost certainly a very complex tapestry.

The Only GM car that I ever owned was a Saturn. They were (in my experience) good cars sold for an honest price.

When the car industry crashed due to dealer-placating nonsense and gross mismanagement, part of the bail out (which the government was paid back and made a profit from) was a “restructuring”.
I knew and told friends, just as soon as I heard the “R” word, that thieving over-paid execs at the top would do two things: blame the hourly pay/pensions/healthcare of plant workers
(As opposed to letting them just fall down dead on the line & be tossed on a pile around back at the end of their shift?)
and find a way to kill the One division of their company that seemed even partly honest: Saturn.
I wished I was wrong, but in the end I wasn’t.

Does the OP live in the US? I’m wondering because of the references to New Zealand and cricket, neither of which would be of much interest to an average American. :slight_smile:

Being in another country would add a BIG complication for marketing cars – currency fluctuations. One currency rises, another falls, the exchange rate can very significantly in in a very short time – a few days. That’s not to say that local dealers in one country couldn’t tag their commercial with local prices, though.

there was no reason to save Saturn. By then all they were selling were badge-engineered cars (mostly Opels) that nobody wanted to buy. And it wasn’t the “thieving over-paid execs” who killed all of the brands, it was the government. The appropriately-named rat fink Steven Rattner was planning on paring GM down to just Chevrolet and Cadillac. It took a hard press from Lutz to convince them that GMC sold enough trucks to be an asset, and Buick would have to stay to promote sales in China. I think he also pushed hard to save Pontiac but it wasn’t to be.