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This is the only way to do new car shopping. Get the price + windows sticker in writing over email. Send it out to all the dealers in the nearby area and tell t

This is the only way to do new car shopping. Get the price + windows sticker in writing over email. Send it out to all the dealers in the nearby area and tell them they have your business if you can beat the deal. Repeat 2-3x, pick the lowest price dealer and be willing to walk out the door if anything funny comes up. Also quite a few dealerships are directly or indirectly part of a franchise so they won't compete with each other. In that case you usually need to expand your radius to ~100mi. Here in PNW there's great Subaru competition but when we looked at Mazda they didn't haggle at all until we went to dealers in a different state.

overcast 10y ago
Yes, when it comes to a lot of luxury European cars, cities typically only have a single dealership, and there isn't much wiggle room. Ended up with one back home 240 miles away. Picked it up my way home for Thanksgiving right off the thruway. Pulled into parents with the new ride :)
- vvanders 10y ago
  Yeah, we were cross shopping Mazda/Ford/Subaru and it was totally obvious that all the Mazda dealerships were owned by a franchise. When we'd mention a quote they'd push us really hard on where we got it from and wouldn't come back with a counter offer or "we can't beat that". Pretty transparent and only changed once we started emailing dealers across state lines. Either way they lost our business. Subaru on the other had has a pretty diverse set of dealers and we ended up with one well below "inventory"(that's a whole nother bit of misinformation) at a dealership ~15mi away. That said Tesla still wipes the floor with any dealership experience I've had which is why I'm pretty excited to see the Model 3 hit the market and more people experience it.
- lagadu 10y ago
  Can't you simply have the manufacturer send the car with your desired options to the dealer and you just pay them the MSRP listed for your configuration in the manufacturer's website? Any negotiation that happens is for a price reduction on that or for extra stuff. It's how it's done for new cars in Europe, if the dealer doesn't have stock (though it can require up to a couple months for the new car to get to the factory to the dealer). I did it just this year.

overcast 10y ago

Yes, when it comes to a lot of luxury European cars, cities typically only have a single dealership, and there isn't much wiggle room. Ended up with one back home 240 miles away. Picked it up my way home for Thanksgiving right off the thruway. Pulled into parents with the new ride :)

vvanders 10y ago
Yeah, we were cross shopping Mazda/Ford/Subaru and it was totally obvious that all the Mazda dealerships were owned by a franchise. When we'd mention a quote they'd push us really hard on where we got it from and wouldn't come back with a counter offer or "we can't beat that". Pretty transparent and only changed once we started emailing dealers across state lines. Either way they lost our business. Subaru on the other had has a pretty diverse set of dealers and we ended up with one well below "inventory"(that's a whole nother bit of misinformation) at a dealership ~15mi away. That said Tesla still wipes the floor with any dealership experience I've had which is why I'm pretty excited to see the Model 3 hit the market and more people experience it.
lagadu 10y ago
Can't you simply have the manufacturer send the car with your desired options to the dealer and you just pay them the MSRP listed for your configuration in the manufacturer's website? Any negotiation that happens is for a price reduction on that or for extra stuff. It's how it's done for new cars in Europe, if the dealer doesn't have stock (though it can require up to a couple months for the new car to get to the factory to the dealer). I did it just this year.