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Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

> Buying a car is such a horrible and archaic process still.

Tell me about it. I bought a used car today and my stress level is through the roof.

If you can afford to, go buy a car before absolutely needed, get a Costco quote, go to the dealer and tell them that’s what your willing to pay, and keep saying no to whatever the financing person says. If they get annoying, walk out and find another dealership and hand them the Costco quote, and repeat. Should be done with whole process in 2 to 3 hours with minimal stress.

This is if you don’t want to play the haggling game. But I feel like most sought after cars don’t really have much haggle room anyway since they are so in demand, might as well save a few hours of your life and just walk in with the Costco quote the dealer has agreed to.

I avoid trading in and all that nonsense, that’s when dealers get to start playing games. I just prefer to run the car into the ground, give it away to family, or if I want a luxury car just lease it and return it.

Also, or alternatively, make sure you have your loan approval in hand as well. I recently bought a car and thought I got an okay rate at the dealer through CapitalOne, but they “figured out” a way to get my interest rate a whole point lower (much better than anticipated) if I went with the dealer warranty. So the price of my purchase went up, but my monthly payments went down. That’s okay with me in the end, but I really would have preferred my “real” rate and no extra warranty of course.

Having a hard price and a solid loan letter in hand before you even step on to the lot is really the only sane way to deal with auto purchasing.

i went in with a 3.64% approval rate.

car guy says "oh, we can beat that!". Come back with "how does 3.5 sound?". "well... fine, I guess... not a huge difference, but if it makes it any easier... whatever".

Mind you this was... $9k loan.

I get their paperwork... reviewing it - 3.59%. .05% difference. I mean, yes, it's lower, but ... "damn, we can beat that!". He was so excited! It's about 40 cents per month cheaper.

40 cents per month cheaper for you, but he made money on the deal. If a car dealership sells you an extended warranty or financing then they get a cut of it. Se he went from making $0 on your third party financing to making some level of money on you. It's a plus for both of you when it works out.

that's what I figured - they had to be making some sort of kickback or referral fee or piece of that action.

Not only that, but for many people, you should probably try to negotiate for the lower net cost vs. lower monthly payments with a higher total cost. If you can float the money, why pay more?

The last time I bought a new car for myself, I had a pre-approved loan from my bank in hand.

The dealership swore up and down they could beat that deal.

Three hours later and they finally gave up and went ahead with our pre-approved loan.

Pissed me off to no end that they made us wait that long before they gave up trying.

my deal only took about 10 minutes. for a late model used car, I wasn't seeing anything much out of the 3.6% range anywhere, so I didn't think they'd be able to do much better. had they surprised me with, say, 2.2%... great, but it's still not a huge savings anyway.

I hope the term was the same.

The whole 4 square shenanigans is really annoying. Agreed on having your own financing lined up, I've never seen a case where a dealer could beat my credit union.

Also wait to mention your trade-in if you have one until after you have the rest of the terms nailed down(and ideally have a carmax quote before).

If the Costco quote is so good then why not just get the car from them?

That's not how it works. "Costco Auto Program" is a system where dealers sell cars to customers at prices negotiated by Costco. Costco itself does not sell cars.

Hm, I'd heard lately of people buying cars from some supermarket chain but that must have been something different.

The Costco Auto Purchase program won't give you a quote online or over the phone. You have to set foot in the pre-selected dealership to receive the price. Costco negotiates the price once a year so there's no guarantee that price is market competitive, especially late in the model year.

That's not true, I received a detailed price breakdown over email.

This definitely doesn't reflect my recent experience in the last year. Got several quotes online from different brands. Costco pricing is a good benchmark; you can probably do better if you're willing to put in the time.

I also purchased a car in the last year, but the Costco approved dealer did not give me a quote online.

If you want to buy a car without much ( if any ) haggling and you do not want a specific car with specific options you should (strangely it applies to both used and new cars in larger dealerships i.e. non Buy here/Pay here shops)

1. Only talk to someone at the dealership who does the fleet sales. Simply ask for "Feet sales"

2. Only buy a car that is already on the floor

3. Do it in the last 27-29th day of the month -- dealerships pay monthly floor plan financing fees and you want to take something off their hand at the last moment they can replace it with a new car and still have the entire 30 days clock to sell it. If you are buying the car on 30th or 31st, the replacement car probably won't be there before 2nd or 3rd of the month, meaning the dealership would pay for 2 or 3 days of a floor plan financing when there is no car that they can immediately sell. That in turn means they would attempt to either bake higher price into the car you are buying or kick the sale to the next month giving themselves another 30 days to sell it.

Why would a dealer go through all this rigmarole about being worried about which day of the month the car was being purchased? Wouldn’t it be far more sane for the delay to just average things out and know that every day will eventually have a similar number of cars sold, so they should be priced accordingly?

Because anyone who is not purchasing it on the worst day would overpay by a few bucks. The margins are very tight, if any.

Not wanted to deal with a dealership is the biggest reason I haven't bought a new car in a long time. Last time was such an awful experience.

I bought a car recently, I was in a hurry and I got stuck with the extended service contract.

When I got home I read the contract carefully and found that I could cancel it within 15 days, so I did.

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