Buying a new car with Internet help

RIVER BENDER - December, 2007

We don't buy a new car often enough to hardly be expected to be give advice, but good old Google at www.google.com has plenty of advice if you simply type in "buy a new car." The first web site to show up was www.edmonds.com, which has all sorts of information on new and used cars, including what we liked called the "True Market Value." TMV calculates what others are paying for new and used cars with the options you select based on sales data in your geographic area. The following is how we bought our new car. You may even find a better way on the web and save more money.

Narrow down the models

The hardest task was deciding on a particular model to buy. We relied on Consumer Reports and Internet reviews and then started visiting dealers. We observed MSRP (manufacturer's suggested retail price) stickers on the windows without comment since at this point we were only interested in comparing features. We came home with lots of brochures from dealers and mulled over them for weeks before finally decided on a manufacturer and an exact model.

Get Internet quotes

We found web pages for dealers of the car we wanted in New Bern and surrounding towns and requested an e-mail quote for the exact car and options. The quote was time sensitive so it was important to move fast to take advantage of it. We preferred to buy our car locally if the price was right so we took our out-of-town e-mail quote to a local dealer to negotiate.

Negotiating

We discovered that you wouldn’t get far by simply asking a salesman if he would discount the MSRP price. The first answer you might get is that no discount is available on highly rated cars. But our salesman said he could probably reduce the price by $300. That's when we showed him our e-mail with a much lower quote from another dealer. After the salesman conferred with the manager, voila, a lower quote was offered close to Edmund's TMV price. But looking at the price breakdown showing tags and tax there was an "administrative" fee of $398 which we objected to, especially since it was $100 more than the other dealer's administrative fee quote. But there was no give on the fee so we moved on and told the dealer that the sale would depend on what was offered on our trade-in.

Trade-in

We were really planning on selling our car ourselves after finding on the web what it might be worth. However, we decided that if the dealer offered a comparable or better price we'd take it. We made it known, however, that we were unhappy about the $398 administrative fee and would expect a good trade-in offer. Surprise! The offer was better than we had expected so we closed the deal.

Invoice price

A lot is said about being armed with the dealer's invoice price before negotiating. You can get this from www.edmonds.com  but it may vary when advertising costs and other fees are included. We suspect the administrative fee is probably tacked on at the end to assure that the dealer always receives a minimum profit above his invoice price.