It took nearly two hours of people telling me I was an idiot for not taking the extended leather steering wheel warranty etc before getting out of there.
Both of these experiences were at official Hyundai dealerships.
To be fair, this was my experience buying a Subaru in Wyoming. The paperwork was then signed, I pushed back on one or two fee line items, they were removed with apologies and I was offered a beer.
I did later get screwed by the dealership when I was tired of doing my own maintenance after having replaced the timing belt on my truck and let the wife take it in for service and they literally replaced every fluid in the vehicle including brake fluid on a 2 year old vehicle, a $900 service.
Insurance would have been more than the monthly car payment, and when I expressed that $400/mo wasn't awful, but $1,000/mo for a car was a non-starter, the guy was seriously like "Well, do you want to eat food, or have a car (with lighted cup holders) to get to work?" and "If you can't afford rent, you can sleep in the car!"
That's still one of the dumbest conversations I've ever had.
Ordering a BMW was an even more pleasant experience and haggling for 6% off was easier than when I did it with my Jeeps.
> I just shut the finance guy down immediately
> Ordering a BMW
These facts paint a pretty obvious picture of why car buying is a much more pleasant experience for you than most: you have experience, you have options, you don't have a lot of patience, and you are willing to loudly signal those things "immediately," leaving no metaphorical door open for a metaphorical foot to slide into.
If someone else is reading this it's worth taking into account when you deal with a higher ticket item than you usually would: in those situations, being polite is a huge disadvantage and a good salesperson will take a mile for every micrometer you give them.
What you have to do is agree to financing (with no prepayment penalties) in exchange for a discount, and then, before you get the first bill you pay the car off in full.
Of course that comes at the cost of customer experience.
In Europe discounts are much lower, and prices are a lot more set in stone.
However, the key caveat here is that most people don't know what they're doing.
So in the US 80% of the population is robbed so that the 20% can take advantage.
In Europe everyone gets a worse deal, but it's never going to be super bad.
Pick your poison :-)
"What's the best price you can give me?"
"Sir, we advertise our lowest prices up front so you don't have any pressure to haggle."
"You can do better than that price."
"... Let me see what I can do."
I believe he got a grand knocked off when it was all said and done.
The other dealers focus a little more on the experience and will haggle a bit with you. They usually don’t use high pressure tactics but won’t give you the lowest price.
I also find the personalities of used car salesmen to be so grating that I'd rather do it all over email.
Haggling is defiantly a thing in the UK you wouldn't buy a car for sticker price.
So basically: it's a culture thing. High pressure tactics are entrenched on the sales culture side, and the customer culture has gotten used to tolerating them.
As an aside, IIRC, someone once told me that Japanese makeup is superior to and cheaper than Western makeup, because Japanese customers are picky and won't put up with less.
The concept of dealerships makes some sense to me: an individual retail customer has zero leverage with a mass market manufacturer, but they'll have more leverage with a smaller dealer, and the dealer will have more leverage with the manufacturer because they're buying far more than a single person. Though the actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
If I want to place an order for a vehicle (not buy one off their lot), the dealer does nothing but still makes a cut.
Not to mention, the majority of folks selling cars (even new cars) are some of the slimiest you'll meet. They are masters of manipulation.
This short NPR piece provides more information: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135633742/economists-hate-ca...
P.s. example of manipulation: some years back I bought a used Honda Civic. The 4th person I got passed to made sure to tell me "the civic is the most stolen car in the US", while trying to sell me on some aftermarket alarm system. I of course knew this was an intentionally misleading statistic, but I'm sure many folks could fall for it.
> If I want to place an order for a vehicle (not buy one off their lot), the dealer does nothing but still makes a cut.
I'm pretty sure this is the same in Europe, or at least in France. Even if I wanted to buy a local make, say a Renault, I don't know how I'd go about getting in touch with the manufacturer directly instead of going through a dealership.
Now I've never actually bought a new car, only motorcycles. And even though it's the same process (I don't think I can order a Honda nor a BMW "direct"), the dealerships didn't try to make me buy useless options.
The difference is that manufacturer-owner dealership is basically not an option in US.
My local Toyota dealership is owned by Toyota. Some other ones are just "licensed" to be their official dealerships, so not owned by Toyota.
In US the "licensed" one can decide "well, the car is rare" (and in pandemic that was every car), here is extra 10-20% dealer markup just because we can. In EU, customer would just go to official Toyota one that doesn't do shit like that
Volkswagen even offers you the option to fetch your vehicle from their factory in Wolfsburg (tour included, drinks cost extra) instead of having it delivered.
Strong wording for something that is not true. You can bypass them by getting a Tesla.
To me this is a bogus argument because with Tesla you don't have the other option. Well, you kind have it but Tesla showrooms/service centers are usually a shitty experience in terms of "a salesman caring for you". Anyway, I'm from Europe and I guess that the car dealership experience is pretty different (I know the US ones just by movies and Monkey Island)
Also, my experience at Tesla dealerships has been the best of any dealership (and keep in mind I'm not a musk apologist (quite the opposite), nor own or plan to own a Tesla). They literally give you the keys and let you drive around by yourself, no questions asked. The experience is lower stress than buying a pair of shoes.
A lot of people want to be able to buy a car the way they buy almost any other consumer product: easily, for a set price they can research ahead of time. Dealerships stand in the way of that.
Now, that does not mean that you can't get higher, valuable utility from luxury vehicle.
If Tesla truly wants to remain a luxury brand forever, its market cap should reflect that.
It shouldn't be the market cap of the next Toyota (car maker) and Panasonic (battery maker) combined and multiplied by 10.
Now, when it fell about 50%. I was just behind the news.
At a certain point this graph was true: https://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/US-Tesla-m...
Which was just insane.
Why do people care about market cap? Because it shows mindshare. It shows what people care about and where investments should go, preorders, a lot of that stuff.
Plus market cap can be converted into money (not 1:1, but still).
The Model 3 was launched in July 2017, about 5.5 years ago. Unveiling in April 2016, more than 6.5 years ago. During the unveiling, if I'm not wrong, they announced the $35k Model 3. In 2019 they actually released the $35k Model 3, as more of a publicity stunt, since they pulled it after only 2 months.
Back then €1 was about $1.2, so that price would have been about €24k.
Instead, in the real world of today, where €1 is less than $1, the cheapest Model 3 you can buy in Europe is about €54k.
So at the new exchange rate, it's more than twice as expensive, and even with the old exchange rate, it would have still been $45k (about 30% more expensive).
So the "Model 2" will actually be around the price that was promised for Model 3.
More than that, Tesla is notoriously unreliable regarding forecasts. At this point I don't think the Model 3 will ever be back to $35k/€35k.
And this new "Model 2" will probably be launched 10 years from now and it will cost what the Model 3 was supposed to cost, back in 2017.
I don't know about you, but I don't make my plans around stuff that takes 15 years to be ready (5.5 years until now + the likely 10 more years it takes them to launch it).
That was being said about literally every Musk venture, either failed or successful.
>The Model 3 was launched in July 2017, about 5.5 years ago. Unveiling in April 2016, more than 6.5 years ago. During the unveiling, if I'm not wrong, they announced the $35k Model 3. In 2019 they actually released the $35k Model 3, as more of a publicity stunt, since they pulled it after only 2 months.
>Back then €1 was about $1.2, so that price would have been about €24k.
>Instead, in the real world of today, where €1 is less than $1, the cheapest Model 3 you can buy in Europe is about €54k.
>So at the new exchange rate, it's more than twice as expensive, and even with the old exchange rate, it would have still been $45k (about 30% more expensive).
Blame ECB (for currency value drop) and supply and demand. Turns out enough people want to buy 35k€ vehicle for 54k€.
>And this new "Model 2" will probably be launched 10 years from now and it will cost what the Model 3 was supposed to cost, back in 2017.
Yeah, but who cares? The purchasing power of that will be equal to what it would have cost based on original estimates.
We call that "vaporware", not worth discussing.
The service they offer is convenience and possibly peace of mind(over an owner sale), but they sure do take an arm and a leg for it.
Just call a dealers finance department and find out if they sell standalone warranty and get a quote (you may need to provide a sample VIN). Make sure they are quoting the official manufacturer warranty coverage (new car) vs some BS third party warranty.
If you do this in advance you can fight off the finance guy easily and (more often) get them to price match to keep your business. This method has saved me thousands.
knowing that warranty can be purchased separately for brand itself is a great way to beat up the finance guy, as that may be where they expect to make the bulk of their profit (although nowadays it may be “market adjustment” and other BS fees)
Car dealers have discovered they can make huge profits by exploiting the inventory shortage. They’ve also kept some of the most arrogant sales staff (“closers”) who are guaranteed big pay days for every sale.
While this isn’t always the case, the days of paying below MSRP appears to be a thing of the past
Calling the sales department and asking for market adjustment and dealer adds info for make/model is also recommended. Most sales people, although not all, will disclose rough numbers.
We went to Honda instead, and paid MSRP. They were only 3 months out, but nobody above us in line wanted the color of the next one that came in so we got it in a month.
Dealerships make a lot of money via convenience (you’re already here for your 30k service) and just plain ignorance (most people have no idea what makes their car work or what repair cost is fair).
Incumbent car manufacturers had no particular incentive to upset the applecart, but Tesla had the opportunity to see how insane it was.
Interestingly, BYD has chosen a direct to consumer model here in Australia (if you haven’t heard of them, you soon will). Mercedes has now switched to an agency pricing model where the dealers sell on commission and don’t own the cars, so Mercedes can legally control the retail price.
Here (in EU) we have anything from manufacturer-led dealership to entirely independent one.
But there laws that make it basically forbidden for manufacturers to sell directly and have a lot of protection for dealerships business. Hence no competition. That was made into slapping extra price over MSRP on rarer cars there. That practice started spanning pretty much all cars during pandemic.
Here is one example
https://www.carscoops.com/2022/11/honda-dealerships-payment-...
> They just provide a service - they have cars available to test drive
... sometimes
> and have a real person to talk to during the purchase
That is almost always clueless about nitty gritty, and just wants to sell you the one they earn most money on.
For a car, the oil change was 300 EUR at the dealership, same problem with losing the warranty. In that case it took one hour - no idea why because it takes just 10 minutes of actual work and there was no wait time to cool the engine and oil, they were almost cold.
Tesla organizes test drives too. And you can bring your Tesla in for maintenance (well not in these states obviously). So, it's not like you don't get any service.
It's the protectionism that is bad. Without it, more manufacturers would cut out the middle man and sell directly. Because why give that big of a cut to a middle man you don't need?
Many brands learned, the hard way, that clients watch on internet but don't buy a new car by internet. Is a too expensive investment. Most people refuse to talk with a robocall and want a local dealership where they can return if they have troubles.
Brands are always trying to reduce the number of official dealerships, to discover later that their business has run dry, and are about to be eaten by a bigger brand. Is happening all the time.
There is some serious pretzel-thinking going on here somewhere in the halls of power (pretzled, one assumes, by careful application of money). The idea that there needs to be a middle-man is weird. The people who want one less layer of abstraction don't need to justify themselves, the dealers have to be doing a lot more than being not-so-bad to justify a mandatory role in the process.
> "The big achievement, instead, was making direct-to-consumer car sales possible."
This isn't the biggest problem America faces, but the idea of a business needing to "innovate" to sell its product to consumers has to be the most unAmerican sentences I've read in an article. It is hard to get a more petty strike in against capitalism.
What capitalism ? The dealer problem is precisely because in the past dealerships negotiated for a laws that stops free market from happening