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My husband and I purchased a new electric car last year. It is for this and many related reasons that we found the exact car we wanted, took the VIN to our ban

My husband and I purchased a new electric car last year. It is for this and many related reasons that we found the exact car we wanted, took the VIN to our bank, and walked into the dealership with a financing check. The dealer financing officer called our bank, gave them the price-out-the-door, and our bank gave them a PIN to write on the check alongside the total amount. We walked away without having any further relationship with the dealership. Despite this, they tried several times to get our written consent to run their own financing. We steadfastly refused. Not everyone is in a position to do this, but it was nice because we didn’t have to put up with any (other) dealer bullshit. (We did have to put up with other tangentially related dealer bullshit, which I have previously written about on here.) Edit: typo and context

zhdc1 4y ago
In the states, dealerships make more from financing kickbacks than from the actual sale. One of the strategies I hear about online is working with the dealership to take out financing with the implicit understanding that you’ll wait to pay off the loan until after they’ve received their payout.
eulers_secret 4y ago
One should always come to the dealer with their own financing already approved- because it’s a starting point for negotiation. It’s very common for dealers to find a better APR than you can get independently. It’s also common to bundle discounts/perks with dealer financing. Customer has to do the math to figure out if the deal is good for them. Dealer GPS tracking and interlocking is usually reserved for “credit criminals” and folks with previous repos.
- TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
  That’s frequently true. This was an unusual situation. In our case, they wouldn’t have been able to better our financing. Our credit union was giving us 1.75%. The best the dealership could do started at about twice that. We had also contracted ahead of time to buy that particular car at almost exactly MSRP, and between the overly eager sales rep who wrote it up with no dealer add-ons, and Toyota’s allocation system deadlines, they were incentivized to walk us out of there as fast as possible. We were there less than an hour. Edit: proofreading

zhdc1 4y ago

In the states, dealerships make more from financing kickbacks than from the actual sale. One of the strategies I hear about online is working with the dealership to take out financing with the implicit understanding that you’ll wait to pay off the loan until after they’ve received their payout.

eulers_secret 4y ago

One should always come to the dealer with their own financing already approved- because it’s a starting point for negotiation. It’s very common for dealers to find a better APR than you can get independently. It’s also common to bundle discounts/perks with dealer financing. Customer has to do the math to figure out if the deal is good for them. Dealer GPS tracking and interlocking is usually reserved for “credit criminals” and folks with previous repos.

TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
That’s frequently true. This was an unusual situation. In our case, they wouldn’t have been able to better our financing. Our credit union was giving us 1.75%. The best the dealership could do started at about twice that. We had also contracted ahead of time to buy that particular car at almost exactly MSRP, and between the overly eager sales rep who wrote it up with no dealer add-ons, and Toyota’s allocation system deadlines, they were incentivized to walk us out of there as fast as possible. We were there less than an hour. Edit: proofreading