I will give you the best tip to not get ripped off when buying a car: do not buy from a dealership. The dealer has a staff of people who rip people off all day

I will give you the best tip to not get ripped off when buying a car: do not buy from a dealership. The dealer has a staff of people who rip people off all day every day and have experience doing so for years. They have an established process. They have money and time. They have perfected the art of extracting all of the value out of a deal. You likely buy a car once every N years. You may be okay at negotiating. You may even be good. I guarantee with 99.999% certainty that you are not as good as the dealership by the simple fact that you do it hundreds of times less frequently than they do. Instead, buy a car on Craiglist. Figure out a car that you want - there are approximately 1000 video reviews for each make and model of car released in the past 20 years on Youtube. Use that to narrow down what you want. Then check the price benchmarking sites like Truecar and KBB for a rough estimate of what you'll expect to pay. Then start to scan FB marketplace and Craigslist for listings. Look for private party (e.g. random people selling their cars), ignore the dealer listings. Be prepared to look at a few cars. Go schedule test drives. If you seriously are interested in a car and think the price is right, pay for a Carfax report. If that is clean (no accidents, not repeatedly registered in different states[sign of concealing accidents]), call around to a few local mechanics and ask them to do a Pre-Purchase inspection. Should be about $150. They will do a basic inspection to ensure the car doesn't have any obvious issues. If that's clean, make an offer on the car. By doing this you will pay ~10-15% less than a comparable car from a dealer. Literally nothing in this process requires any special technical or automotive expertise. If you want to be a bit more sophisticated you can buy an OBDII scanner from amazon for $20 and check the codes yourself to further suss out issues. It does take a reasonably more amount of time (call it a month for a motivated buyer) than the dealer. If your time is so valuable, you need a car today or you can't be bothered to do the legwork, then going to a dealer is okay - you'll just pay more. I'm sure a bunch of people will rush in and talk about how you can get screaming deals at the end of the month, with certain incentives, asking for quotes from a bunch of dealers, blah blah blah. This is true, however it's risky because it's complicated (way more complicated than buying private party) and error prone on your part. You will have to understand the (reasonably) complex incentive structure for dealers, which of course varies by manufacturer. Shopping around is theoretically very good but post COVID my experience with dealer salespeople is that the moment they get the sense you have any sophistication, your emails or calls go straight to the memory hole. There are more than enough people that are easier to deal with than you, so they don't need to talk to you. In summary, when dealing with car salesmen, the original LLM has some sage wisdom "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."