Really glad that dealers in Canada can't charge over MSRP for new vehicles.
In the end, there were about $11k in "extras" and they low balled me on my trade-in vehicle. I ended up walking away.
I'm now wishing I put zero down on my last car, because it's looking like my loan is way cheaper than inflation is going to be over the life of the loan.
Would you have invested that money in something that is currently growing at least as fast as inflation?
But either way, the rate on the car note is lower than inflation, so I'd be ahead just by spending the cash on something else.
Of course in the end if you have options you need to run your own numbers. Things change far too often to give general advice.
Financing is usually profit shuffled off to the bank.
There are lots of dealers to buy vehicles from, lots of people to sell your vehicle to, plenty of alternatives to "add on", most of which are unnecessary, and lots of banks and credit unions to loan you money.
When you have alternatives and can use them at the dealer, you'll get dealership down on prices. Understand the incentives the dealers have (how they make money, especially extra money), understand their cost structure, etc. and you'll have even more bargaining power.
For example, you can often leverage financing to get the price down. The dealers get extra cash by bringing financing deals to their partners, so they might take a few hundred off the vehicle if you finance. Even if you want to pay cash, take the financing (make sure no origination fees or early payment fees) and pay it off before it accrues any interest.
I've also walked into dealers before with print outs of the same vehicle priced lower at other dealers and magically they become more flexible. I've ever tried this before where I didn't present this info and they let me walk out of the store, refusing to budge. Then when I came back with the info, they became more flexible.
The service departments pull this nonsense as well. I've negotiated service prices down 40% in the past and know that you can use things like recall repairs to get a better deal on repairs you actually need done (if you do x repair for $y, you can do this recall repair as well).
I think dealers are an extremely bad component of the vehicle market, but eliminating them will lead to people who can exploit the system to pay more. It will be an overall net benefit for the market though.
I looked at my itemized bill and I had actually paid $200 for a phone cable.
Oh and one dealer had mandatory financing.
Oh, this explains it. I spend time in Wyoming. There appeared to be, last summer, a solid business of people buying cars across the border, driving them to Montana and/or Wyoming, and then re-selling them used.
I thought it was just the used car market being weird, though that didn't explain the Canada bit. This does.