Painless Car Shopping
I’ll come out and say it: I hate buying a car. I hate the experience so much that I’ve gone the sucker’s route in the past; my last car was bought used from a no-haggle dealership, and the previous car was a Saturn, which institutionalized the no-haggle policy. The problem with no haggle is that what it really means is that you can’t talk the dealer down. There’s still negotiation on after-market items and that’s where you as the purchaser get taken to the cleaners. So the no-haggle experience wasn’t very satisfying.
Last summer, my family reached a point where our aging SUV had to go. We knew what we wanted to replace it with, but it came down to buying the thing, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. But this time I determined that I was going to do better.
I first looked at a broker, based on Nick Harris’ experience. The broker we went through was nice enough, very accomodating for test drives, but the process broke down when it came to money. In the end, the broker is still a dealer, just one that doesn’t have a showroom.
After that experience, I discovered James Bragg. He’s published a book that’s now out of print, but his car-buying package contains all the good stuff from the book. It’s not rocket science, the important thing is that new cars are a commodity and to get a decent deal, you need to make sure the dealers know that they need to compete for your business. Bragg gives you a script to use, along with pricing data, and some very important formulas for calculating lease payments. These three things are enough to get you started.
In the end, my car shopping experience amounted to a showroom visit to one dealer, followed by a long Saturday working the phones to finalize a deal. It was a fair bit of work getting deals in place, but in the end, you find out which dealer really needs to make a sale and I was able to get the car we wanted at dealer invoice. The winning dealer, Pedersen Toyota, really went the extra mile, getting us the car we wanted in a dealer trade and working with me to make sure the numbers lined up. They knew they were competing for our business, and they stepped up and competed. I won’t say that the process was painless, but I was, for once, happy with the deal I arrived at; we got the car we wanted and I’m fairly sure that was the best price we could get. In the end, that’s what you want.
— Gordon Weakliem
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