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[quote=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. [/quote]

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