Car price negotiation
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Anonymous
| How does it work? A car we have been on the waiting list for has finally come in. I'm sure there's some back and forth that needs to happen with the car price. The dealership said the buying process can take 2-3 hours. What does that process look like now? We are ready to pay in full. |
Anonymous
| The process now is you pay what they ask or they sell it to the next person who will. |
Anonymous
|
The negotiation goes like this -
You: "are you flexible on the price?" Them: "no." the 2-3 hours is all the awful paperwork you have to sign and them trying to upsell you on some sort of undercarriage treatment |
Anonymous
| It will be 2 to 3 hours of them trying to sell you extras (wheel and tire protection, extended warranties, gap protection, prepaid maintenance, etc) and trying to force you to get a loan instead. They won't like you paying in full. |
Anonymous
Depends on the dealer. Yes, they do try to upsell you on all of the warranties and extra protection. We recently bought a car and were upfront that we did not need financing. The salesman was fine about it and did not try to pressure us to take out a loan. We have never had an issue writing a check for a car. They acknowledge that they do make money on financing but they are happy to sell a car for cash too. |
Anonymous
| So, any problem/disadvantage of taking the financing and then just paying if off right away? |
Anonymous
|
I bought a Subaru last month and did talk them down a bit. They were charging a $900 dealer fee, and I got them to take off $700. My strategy had been to nickel and dime them item by item. This was working to get us down $400 but the salesman wanted to get it over with and asked what price would get us to take the car home. We said another $300 and the salesman was displeased (said it affected his commission, as if we cared) but his manager agreed to it. There wasn’t a solid reason for why we asked for $700 off total. It just got us down to a nice round number for the out the door price. I lied and said if they didn’t bring down the price we’d order one in our preferred color at a dealership closer to home and didn’t care that it would take weeks for it to be delivered.
I was shocked we were able to negotiate. We hadn’t bought a car in over a decade and had never bought new, so it’s not like we were experienced. We brought our baby and I thought it must have seemed obvious we were not walking out of there empty handed after spending 2 hours at the dealership, and driving 45 minutes to get there. Also, I did most of the negotiating. I’m pleased to know that sexism didn’t prevail at this dealership. After we agreed on a price it took about another hour to wrap up in the finance office. Lots of forms to sign and had to decline their exorbitant service add ons. It was about 3.5 hours total because they had trouble installing the temp tags on the car- the 2023s apparently lack pre drilled holes. It’s wild it took us that long because my husband didn’t even test drive the car because we’d already done that at a different dealership. I only test drive it a few blocks, and we knew exactly what we wanted do there wasn’t much discussion of features. As we left another customer asked how long we’d been there. He said he’d been there 4 hours and was clearly annoyed the sake still wasn’t complete. The negotiation didn’t even get slowed down much with running numbers by the manager. My item by item approach was what slowed things. Also, because the dealership was busy, our salesman was off doing different things. He sold 2 other cars that day. . They do want you to finance. This dealership had an extra $1,000 fee that was waived only if you financed with them. That was fine with us since our plan had been to only put 25% down. (This was a compromise. My husband wanted to pay in full but I wanted to finance the whole thing so we could put the rest in stocks to free up that money for something else.) There’s no penalty if we pay it off sooner, and I believe that’s the law in MD, but be sure to make sure that’s what your contract says too. |
Anonymous
| Are you writing this from 2019? There is no “negotiation.” You pay their price or you go home. |
Anonymous
| You should have negotiated and gotten the price in writing when you were put on the waitlist. Now the dealer can hold you over a barrel and price it whatever they want. |
Anonymous
| Best advice I got on a recent car purchase: focus on the "out the door price." Dealers make up all sorts of bogus fees and try all sorts of bogus upsells. Stick to the one number. Ideally you'd pay MSRP since you were on a waiting list, but many cars are going for above these days. If you can't get an acceptable price with this dealer, try to find one that will commit to MSRP when you go on the waiting list. |
Anonymous
Reminder: the salesperson is NOT the finance person. Two different profit categories. Sales makes commission on the car purchase, be it cash or loan. The finance person makes commission on how much they can upsell while you're signing all that paperwork. Please remember the salesperson has NOTHING to do with the time it takes to finance. They are waiting as long as you are to finish so they can get you keys and on your way. Please don't blame them when it takes forever to get through the financing. Ask me how I know. My spouse sells. He's home late often at night because the finance person is incompetent and can't get their job done in a timely manner. |
Anonymous
If there were no financing, your spouse probably wouldn't have a job. How many salespeople do you think a dealership would need if you couldn't finance a car? |
Anonymous
Not true. We just got a brand new Tiguan with roughly $2000 off the MSRP. We do thank you suckers who pay the full MSRP for making it a tad easier for us with a spine! |
Anonymous
Did you order or just buy off the lot? How picky were you- ie would you have bought something else if you couldn’t get that one? Trying to get a sense for the market! I am looking at minivans so there aren’t as many options that meet my needs so am curious if people negotiating off MSRP are still doing lots of legwork ahead of time or waiting for specific cars to come in. |
Anonymous
It depends on the brand. Brands that people don't want, such as VW, Chrysler, Dodge, etc, you can get below MSRP. If you can get a Toyota at MSRP, that is the best you will get. |