My Recent Car Buying Adventure

The last car I bought, I basically walked in and said can I buy this and they said sure. I paid whatever price it was. And I resented the car from that moment until I traded it in a couple of weeks ago.

So when my wife and I decided we’d need a new car to help transport The Critter (yes, that will be the child’s name on this blog for quite some time until they’re old enough to object), I was determined to do better.

I think I did.

I bought a new 2008 Honda Pilot with Navigation, a car that retails for $37,966, for $28,695. That’s $9,271 under retail, about 24% off.

Moreover, I ended up buying it from the dealer that I wanted to buy from (McGrath, they’re about a mile a way and convenience means a lot) and I also got a good trade in value on the old car.

I had to work for it, and the lovely J helped me at a couple of points where I really needed it. But all I really did was follow the advice on CarBuyingTips.com. You should too.

This is how it all went down.

Step one was narrowing it down to three models. The Toyota Highlander, the Hyundai Veracruz and the Honda Pilot. The Pilot was an add on. I started with the idea that we’d probably buy a Highlander.

Step two was contacting a dealership for each of the brands using various internet services. The first I used was Costco’s car buying service. The basics of this program are simple. You have to be a member. Costco negotiates with dealers and refers you to their approved dealer. This dealer gives you a flat, no haggle price. The second I used was cars.com. Once I sent out requests to these dealers, pricing information came in pretty quickly. It was challenging to understand it all and compare apples to apples, but a little pen and paper did the trick.

Finally it was time to visit the dealerships. We didn’t go in any particular order but wound up at Honda first and it happened to be the Honda dealership that was the Costco approved dealership. The price? Invoice minus $3,500. Wow! One problem: another dealership had already emailed me a slightly better price. This dealer said they would negotiate hold back. Great!

A note on the $3,500. It just so happens that last month Honda was providing dealers with $3,500 cash, so it was a good month to buy a Pilot.

We spent the rest of that day doing test drives and talking to other dealers on the phone. The Hyundai was out of the running very quickly. The Veracruz was simply too expensive for what it was. The Highlander was almost out of the running but we wanted to test it one more time. And we visited another Honda dealership.

This last Honda dealership on that first day was McGrath. I asked them if they participated in the Costco program. Yes, they said. I said great, can I see the Costco price sheet. Sure. And then they came back without one and with something that was NOT the Costco price sheet that two other dealers had shown us and said that the Costco price was 2% over invoice. And they didn’t mention anything about the $3,500. So I asked about it. He went to talk to his manager. They came back with a revised price sheet that then reflected the $3,500 off of the 2%. I said OK, thanks. We’ll be back.

And then was the “How about taking it home tonight?” No, thanks. And then the manager came over and did the same thing. No, thanks, I said. It took a while to get out, but we left.

The lovely J wasn’t around Sat, so the next day we could do anything was Monday. We landed on the Honda Pilot for sure after one more Highlander test drive and so I started calling around to the dealers we had talked to and asking for price quotes, out the door pricing, on exactly the model we wanted.

And I said I was buying a car that day.

Everyone sent them. Except McGrath. They kept trying to get me to come in. I eventually sent them this note after they basically ignored my request for a quote for the third time.

Thanks for the note. Every other dealer has provided an itemized out the door price, by email, without any questions. Since you have not, I’m guessing McGrath isn’t interested in my business. Please tell Rick and Jeremy that I appreciate their time on Friday and that I’m sorry we can’t work together.

A couple of hours later, I got a call, this time from a sales manager I hadn’t met before. Sure they’ll work with me why don’t I come on in. No, I need a price. You’ll get a great price. Just come in. No, I need you to email it to me. So, finally they do and it matches the other low price that I have. By this time the third dealer I had been working with, the first one where I test drove the car, had dropped out. I had two dealers willing to give me the same low price. All that was left was determining my trade in value.

So I took it in, stopped at McGrath first. They low balled it. I said no. They raised it. I said no, it has to be more. They raised it again just a little. I was ready to cave, but I walked away and went to talk to J. She was sitting in the waiting room. The number was still $200 under our minimum ($4,000, Edmunds has a trade-in value of $2,800).

J said we should walk.

It took me a second and then I said, you know what, you’re right.

So she and I walked out together, said goodbye to the pricing person for the used car, the sales manager I had been working with and the rep, and we left. We got back into the old car.

Then the rep we had been working with came running out and said OK we’ll do it.

So we went back in. (In hindsight, it would have been fun to say something like, no the price just went up you have to give us more now. Oh well.)

And then more pricing issues. One of the things carbuyingtips tells you is check their math. We did. And their out the door price was off by a few hundred dollars because of a mistake in the tax rate. My zip code is a suburban zip code where tax is 7.75%, but the address is in Chicago so tax would be 9%, so it’s possible that it was a legitimate mistake and not a “mistake” mistake.

In any case, I had to go through and figure out exactly where the error was, point it out and then point out that he said he would beat the other quote by $100.

In the end, with me doing as much work on my end as I had to, they did. They still wanted to sell me rust proofing (and, to my frustration, no one in the dealership seems to have heard of the Simpsons or the loser salesman Gil or the episode where he sells Coleco’s to Springfield Elementary) and a bunch of extended warranty nonsense. And it took like four hours to get the car delivered.

But we bought the car and everything has so far all worked out very well.

And to those of you worried about getting on too many dealers’ contact lists if you submit a bunch of price requests, so far that has not proven to be a problem. They want to sell you a car. Once they know you’re out of the market, they pretty much don’t waste time or resources on you. The other dealer who gave me a low price, he sent a few messages saying he was surprised that I would use him to get a better price at another dealer. That actually warmed my black little heart a bit, but that’s another story.

The end result? I love this car.

Sure, it’s comfortable and everything, but a big part of why I love it is that I feel like I did OK on the price. Everyone at the dealership kept talking and showing me numbers about how they were losing money on this car, which, in my mind, means that I probably left some money on the table, but I don’t think I left much.

It took was two days worth of work, some time on the net researching and a polite demeanor.  But I found exactly what I was hoping for.