jump to navigation

We Bought a New Car! April 1, 2005

Posted by Ben in : General , comments closed

So, we bought a new car last night, and it was the smoothest and most pleasant process I’ve ever been through with a dealer—those are adjectives not usually given to car salespersons or dealerships. But that’s how it was for us.

We bought a 2005 Honda Pilot last night for several reasons: we’ve been in the market for a new car since my 2000 Honda Civic sustained $6300 in hail damage last month, Honda’s 2.9% financing special ended on March 31st, and we’ve been wanting an SUV for a while.

A few weeks ago, I took the Civic to Carmax to get a quote, and they quoted me at $1800—a full $6000 less than what I thought the Blue Book value of the car would’ve been before the hail damage! I thought to myself how cosmetic damage could ruin the value of one’s car so much, but it apparently wasn’t the hail damage that lowered the value. While my car incurred no frame damage from an earlier wreck a few years ago, the body shop welded parts back onto the frame itself, which I’m told weakens the “crumple corners” of the frame. This is what lowered my car’s value so much. Carmax told me that, even with with cosmetic damage repaired, I couldn’t expect to get more than $2000 for my car because of the “frame damage.”

In addition to deciding to buy an SUV for camping and hauling things around, etc., we decided to try out a few “tricks” we’ve heard for buying a car. One is to always buy on the last day of the month. This is because the dealership’s allocation for the next month is determined by how many they sell this month—among other things. Also, we were told to communicate either by e-mail or fax and not to show up in person to discuss prices. If you show up in person, you will not get the lowest deal (a fact that one dealer admitted to me yesterday). Apparently, the salespeople assume that you’ve been shopping around to find the best deal on the Internet if you contact them via e-mail, so they know that you know what other dealerships are offering; thus, they’re likely to be more competitive. If you walk on the lot, they’ll offer you a higher price because they’re more certain they’ll be able to sell you the car since they have you there.

I found that both of these tricks work. For one, we were able to get a below-invoice price. When we’ve walked onto the lot in the past and asked how low they could go on a price, they told us they could go to the invoice price but no lower—which we now know is bull. Another thing is that we asked each salesperson for their “bottom line” final price—the drive-away price including tax, tag, title, destination charges, everything. This tells them that we mean business, that we’re not playing games, and that we’re shopping around for the lowest price. With one dealership—the one we finally went with—we saw that they even knocked an extra $500 off the base price since it was the last day of the month (he even told us this)—we really think what he did was knock off the “destination charge” because Liz questioned it, and he apparently was eager to make the sell.

In the end, we purchased a car for $5000 less than the manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $30,120. Our base price was $25,597, and our drive-away price was $28,320.88. This was the price we got them down to through e-mail and phone conversations without ever visiting the lot, and they never raised it once with extra stupid features (they threw in the mud gards and clear-coat finish for free) when we got to the lot. Had we just visited the lot instead, we wouldn’t have gotten any lower than the invoice price as our base (we know this because Hennesy Honda wouldn’t go any lower than invoice when we visited the lot), which was $27,611.

In the end, we got a great SUV for a great deal thanks to Ben Choi at Curry Honda. I’d recommend him and Curry Honda anytime.

To sum up, here are the buying tips I recommend: