You Will Soon Be Able to Buy a Car at Walmart
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
The salesman kept "making math mistakes" on the invoice that would have inflated the overall price of the purchase by several thousand dollars. If I didn't know ahead of time what I was buying and what it would cost, I would have been taken for a ride.
One of the most frustrating, disgusting, and disheartening purchases I've ever made. Anything that can bypass that BS is a very welcome change.
Buying our 85D was just a matter of sitting down with the rep at a Mac in-store and ordering from TeslaMotors.com. The most painless car buying experience I've ever had. We could have done it from our house if we wanted to.
[edit]
I should add that we've done the whole "pit 2-3 dealerships against each other over email with exact spec" before and while it does get you a good deal, it takes a ton of time and requires you to be willing to walk away and waste an evening if they pull any funny business.
Can confirm, agreed on a price, the dealer wanted $3,500 for a pinstripe at the last minute. Had to walk, went to another dealership 40 miles away, got an agreement on the original deal negotiated with the original dealer, new dealer didn't have the car in stock, so the car I wanted to buy in the first place was shipped 40 miles to the new dealer. And I watched the new dealer's salesman peeled off the $3,500 pinstripe with his fingers before I'd take possession of the car.
Then after all the paperwork was signed, and I handed over a check for the full purchase price of the car, the new dealer refused to hand over the keys until I paid a $500 etching fee, and the saleperson re-etched the VIN in the car windows over the top of the VIN already etched in the car windows.
Fuck dealers.
$500 etching fee, and the saleperson
re-etched the VIN in the car windows
over the top of the VIN already etched
in the car windows.
My god. I don't even understand the necessity of... etching? a VIN? into a window? Why is that even a billable line item? It sounds like a form of vandalism.
Why did they insist on ruining your windows with a numeric marking? Windows can break. They're replacable parts. They carry no assurance of permanence.
Who requires this? Why is it required?
What is accomplished by this practice? Why does it cost the buyer money? Why does it fetch that much money, when it's essentially an unskilled task that occupies minutes of effort?
EDIT: Oh wow. I didn't even know this was a thing. [0] Certainly not anything of a $500 value. Certainly not a requirement.
Is there no place to report such behavior to? The manufacturer?
Fun fact, most dealers for a certain mfgr withing a metro area are usually owned by a single business and re-branded so they can collude on prices.
You find this out when you start shopping across state lines. All of the dealers in one state didn't want to come down on price until they found out I was talking to other dealers in another adjacent state, then they changed really fast.
New Jersey. But it's fairly universal behavior.
> Is there no place to report such behavior to? The manufacturer?
The manufacturer is at the mercy of the dealers. Do you really think it's in the best interests of auto manufacturers to have their customers bent over a barrel on surprise fees and gouged on maintenance? There have been a number of attempts for auto manufacturers to make things less shitty for customers (Scion, Saturn, etc.) but at the end of the day, these attempts were not in the dealer's interest, and failed.
[edit] you have to be willing to walk. You say, this price or I walk, and if they pull any bs, get up and leave. If more people did this, dealerships would change their tactics
>CarSaver then will connect customers with a local, certified dealer and schedule an appointment to visit the dealership. If a shopper doesn’t contact the dealership, an auto adviser reconnects with that shopper.
I bought my last vehicle (2008 Toyota Tundra) through Costco. If my next vehicle purchase wasn't going to be a Tesla, I'd probably do it again.
Not exactly, unless something changed. You get to go through a "Costco approved dealer" still, and the experience is still not all that great. You aren't just buying the vehicle directly from Costco itself. We tried this just over a year ago and ended up with the same unpleasant car buying experience. (backed out of it when a family member got a sales manager gig at a nearby dealership. Went through him. Zero stress and no shenanigans.)
The demise of Saturn means I'll probably never own a car.
My only hope is that some Chinese or Indian company will come to the US and strike an exclusive contract with Walmart or Costco to be the exclusive retailer (the contract will specify that the term "dealership" will never be used) of their cars in the US with a nationwide policy of only selling at MSRP.
Honestly though. If you can detach the financing ("Got the cash. Nope. Not interested in talking monthly payments.") and trade-in ("If you don't give me X, I'll just donate it.") whether or not either of those things are true. Then look up the dealer cost on Edmund's or whatever. Add $500 and tell them to take it or leave it.
It's still a bit of a hassle and you may not totally optimize your purchase but there need be very little actual haggling involved.
The issue with your suggestion BTW is that manufacturers probably couldn't sell to them because doing so would violate their contracts with existing dealers.
Of course, the process can still suck. They'll still give you a spiel about how you must have the undercoat or extended warranty or whatever. There's room for other shenanigans too. Last time I bought from a dealer they managed to overcharge me $1.25 (originally it was $20 over but I fought that, but figured $1.25 wasn't worth it) and then they filed a lien on my title even though I didn't finance with them, which I didn't find out until I tried to trade the car in much later. Untangling that mess was quite entertaining.
But, yeah, apparently stuff can still happen. Believe me. I'm not a fan of car shopping.
What I want is a Chinese manufacturer, who has no previous presence in North America, entering the US market and signing a nationwide exclusive contract with a single retailer.
Picking a name from Wikipedia's list of Chinese automakers, let's take Great Wall Motors. They have no presence in the North American market (the closest they come is Costa Rica, which is in CALA). Let's say that one day, they decide they want to sell in the US. So they sign a contract with Walmart where Walmart will be the sole retailer in the entire country who would be allowed to sell Great Wall cars, and Walmart will sell them the same exact way they sell any other appliance (though perhaps Best Buy would be a better choice of retailer than Walmart, since a much larger chunk of their business revolves around selling appliances).
Bought a new car for the first time this year. First I found the options I wanted. Searched all over from Southeast to mid Atlantic, found the lowest priced and documented it along with several similar cars locally.
Came in with print outs and links to my findings. Told them either they match or I talk to one of their local competitors or if needed fly to Virginia using sky miles.
A couple trips to "talk to the manager" and 7.5k off MSRP. All while the customer next to me bought a similar car at full price.
You need to be able to get up and walk out at any point.
Also, my brother-in-law bought a RAV4 in a cold weather state recently and did the whole "I will only pay invoice!" thing. They were like, "Yes sir!. Sign this this this. Bye". It's hard to know what kickbacks the dealers are getting over invoice so the dealer may still be making a good 5% over invoice (and on volume this is really good).
Don't get me wrong, you did the right thing. I got hard core scammed when I bought my first new car and now only buy used. Fell in love with a car from a magazine at 22, walked into a dealer and bought a dealer car (essentially a used car) at near full price with their financing (something crazy like 22%).
I'm not against negotiation. Just buy used and negotiate. Dealerships are evil.
https://help.edmunds.com/hc/en-us/articles/206102377-Invoice...
Edit: deleted a hanging sentence Edit2: Tip #2: join a credit union. When I finally read the 22% rate (on a 35k car, in 1992) I called my bank. They gave me a 6% quote and said "don't do anything. we'll take care of this". I got so many angry calls from the dealership claiming my credit will be ruined, they will repossess the car, I'm a scumbag, etc. None of those are true. You have a few days in California to transfer a loan if you fuck up (thanks Cali).
I purchased a used Toyota Prius from a Toyota dealership like this. I reviewed their inventory online, test drove the car, and paid the price they had advertised online.
The only thing they asked was if I would prefer their financing options over the loan I was preapproved for from my bank. They had a much better rate so I went with their financing. Overall, it took about 2 hours to do the paperwork and get the keys after the test drive. It would be been faster if I didn't need financing.
The experience of buying a car should be the exact same as the experience of buying a refrigerator or a washing machine or any other appliance.
Is there further haggling on the price once you have your car custom built and shipped to the dealer?
It's hard for me to understand how people get pushed around when they're walking into a situation where they may be on the verge of spending tens of thousands of dollars.
The car dealership industry is hyper-competitive; if any part of the transaction makes you feel uncomfortable, let them know and take your money elsewhere. Dealers are a dime a dozen.
You're spending $20,000+ and you don't want to drive around to a few dealers? Spending a day or two to make the best decision is too much for you? That's why you get pushed around.
A much better strategy is to figure out which car you want, then go online and contact all the dealerships within an 8-hour drive asking them for their best price on it.
First of all, I didn't mention "driving around" all over the map; you did, along with what a problem it is. Now you're coming up with some ridiculous scenario about driving around to 5 states? Complete strawman. In every metro area I've lived there are larger suburban areas filled with dealerships of all brands.
If 8 hours is too much time to spend helping form a decision on such a large purchase, than by all means go get "pushed around" by the scary car dealer.
Sadly, outside of perhaps a of brand or two that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of tens of thousands, that doesn't seem to be a particularly viable option today.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that half the people complaining here have never actually bought a car.
This isn't 1988. All the information is out there. Arm yourself with the price you are willing to pay for the car and make it known. Don't pay more. There is no need for any game, and I've never been forced to play any, having purchased 10-15 cars in my lifetime.
If so, I'm guessing you are not from a region of the world where dealerships are given special protections against competition and actively prevent the sale of vehicles the way the consumer wants to buy them.
Then you'll pay slightly more for your vehicle. Just like you'll pay more for a shorter commute or nicer school. No big deal. Life is about trade-offs.
If we estimate the purchase price of a home to be roughly 10 times higher than a car - and following your logic - is sounds like you would be willing to spend 10-20 days driving around shopping for mortgages and would talk to 20-30 different lenders at minimum.
Is that a fair assumption?
As you say though, the best way around the problem is simply to make sure you don't settle on a specific car so you're in a position to walk away if the dealer isn't great. That's easier to say than do though.
I like the implication here.
Because they're not going to have the specific car/options you want anyway, are they? No, you're going to need to accept what they want to sell...
New cars purchases are a bad financial move since you're going to lose thousands more on depreciation vs. buying used.
It also helps that in the NY suburbs there are about 4 or 5 other places to buy that same exact car within a 30-45 minute drive.
How you feel about the dealership should be accounted for in your model. If the Honda dealers are jerks, don't buy a Honda, or buy a Honda elsewhere. Buying a car is a huge expense and shouldn't be taken lightly.
Of course eventually some corrective upvoting like I've applied already will fix the imbalance for some of these wrongfully-downvoted comments. Perhaps even parent, making this comment look silly. However this is still a phenomenon that has occurred on this page, so I thought I'd point it out.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/retail/2002-04-23-walma...
Here's an example from 2008:
http://adage.com/article/news/wanna-buy-a-car-head-walmart/1...
(Nitpick, but it's "Walmart" not "Wal-Mart".)
"You will soon be able to buy a car from Wal-Mart" sounds right, but *"at Wal-Mart" rings false to me.
Wal-Mart is the entity selling to you, and Walmart is the physical location.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carvana
I remember the old iMotors experience. It was nice. Too bad in some states, car dealers are still ridiculously powerful. (ahem. Texas.)