[quote=treehugger]We are seriously trying to buy one for our daughter (or at least help her buy one), she is in college and wants a new car (grandpa is giving her a few thousand for down payment) and I have e-mailed about 20 dealerships and they are the biggest bunch of morons I have ever dealt with!!! How soon can you get down here and test drive??? As soon as you give me the best deal I will come purchase! Does anybody actually waste their time dealing with these idiots in person? At least at home i can have a drink and relax on my couch while I waste my time. Or talk to them while I am out on a run with my dogs, that was fun!
I search the internet it says base model MSRP is $27,350 with $3,500 toyota incentive starting point should be $23,850 plus any other incentives from dealership, they have marked the cars up and are trying to pretend the $3,500 off of $29,800 is a great deal, do they not use google? Type in 2019 Prius Prime MSRP and every site says starting at $27,350!!! Only one dealership actually provided a breakdown of costs and I am still awaiting final, but we are at about $21,900-$4,500 fed rebate would equal $17,400 and she would definitely qualify for the state rebate of $1500, so now at $15,900, ugh, don’t really want to drive to Moreno Valley tomorrow![/quote]
I am sorry because people like me ruined it for people like you.
I bought all my cars over the internet with a large paper trail and now internet sales managers are very hesitant to deal with people over email because they know that the moment they give a price, you’ll shop it across 10 other dealers until you find the lowest one….
However you only really need one dealer to name a price and then you can let the ball roll.
My advice is to first contact one dealer via TrueCar. Don’t let the TrueCar estimate fool you. You can usually do a lot better than TrueCar … all the cars I bought we’re always well below the “exceptional” price range .
Get one estimate from exactly one dealer from TrueCar. Then take that estimate and open your favorite HTML editor and knock a few hundred off that email and forward it to the next dealer to see if they can beat it. Contact the interest sales dept directly not through TrueCar, that way it costs the dealership less. Rinse and repeat. Usually the Toyota dealers that have a large inventory are usually the ones that are more willing to wheel and deal over the internet. Don’t ever set foot in the showroom. Never give them your real phone number … Always do things over email or text. I negotiated my last car completely over SMS between 4 dealers. Cerritos and Browning in LA, and El Cajon and Mission Valley down here. Some of them didn’t want to do it over email,so I convinced them to do it over text. I guess they felt it was more like over the phone than over email (despite SMS having a paper trail too. )
On first year production car (4 months from US debut) I got my car about $4200 below MSRP or about $1500 below invoice. That was better the friends paying MSRP (lol) and family s-plan discount pricing. My original car that I wanted was a previous year leftover that I got down to about $7100 but decided I wanted the current year model. The two dealers up LA provided the feeder prices, I got Mission Valley to match, then I applied a high pressure text blast to El Cajon saying I was going to buy in a few hours and I needed a price quote. El Cajon lowered their price and sent me the OTD total price via SMS..I took a screenshot of that and forwarded it to Mission Valley and said make me an offer so I don’t need to go all the way to ElCajon. The salesman find ally got tired of it and gave me a final price $800 below ElCajon….I bought it the same day.
….and then burned my temporary Google Voice number and never heard from the other 3 dealers again.
Yes, I guess it was kind of cold and brutal…Bit I never got a good treatment whenever I was physically in any of the dealerships…With the exception of the Aston Martin dealership in Kearny Mesa, who was very nice to me and offered me a test drive and Porsche of San Diego that let me borrow the 991 911s demo for almost an hour to try it out. God I miss driving that car….But buying that short sales condo was a better investment back then..
