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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

The secret is basically that they're ripping you off, which pretending they're helping you, and under no circumstances should you buy a car on credit because they use that to obscure the real price.

Also, even if it pisses them off, haggle and get prices from multiple dealerships, then play them off against each other. If they won't play, walk away to another dealer.

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It is actually possible to buy a car on credit without getting ripped off. The way I did it was, having already gotten agreement on the selling price, and having a good estimate of the likely interest rate, I decided what loan term I wanted and computed the corresponding monthly payment based on these variables -- all before sitting down to do the final negotiation. I declined all dealer add-ons and all financing offers that didn't match my precomputed numbers. Eventually they made one that did.

I'm not saying I got the best deal possible; I didn't shop dealerships. (OTOH I'm not sure that would have worked, as the model I was buying was in demand.) But basically, I think I did okay.

This is exactly how I buy them. I used to sell them. Know exactly what you want. Pit three dealers against each other for the same car (exact product code) for a few days. Have funding secured already from a credit union but don't tell the dealer until you're in their finance office and they fail to provide better terms than your CU did

That's how we got our Sienna. I got it down to 2 salesmen at different dealers (one a fleet sales), and was about to save a last $300 on one, but the competing dealer agreed to come to our house and deliver the car (which was huge at the time b/c we just had twins which was the reason we went minivan), so we went with him. Felt the pricing was much fairer this way.

I'll probably go with TrueCar.com or something like that to automate the process next time, unless I get a Tesla.

Going back and forth between a few dealers on the exact car I wanted to buy worked for me. When I got the price down to where one of the dealers would rather pay me $200 than lower the price, I was done.

I documented my experience at http://xn.pinkhamster.net/blog/misc/buying_an_audi_under_inv...

I bought my last car on credit, but I did it through my bank and got an insanely low rate (1%). The salesman whined constantly about how my bank was terrible at their job and that we should just use the super convenient in-store financing instead.

I still got ripped off, especially on the trade in--but my wife was rather pregnant and close to being put on bedrest at the time and we didn't want to have to deal with Craigslist or whatever for selling her old car.

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