I was told by Tesla CS the rebate is secured when you place the order. Even if you put your order on hold, you still get the rebate when you pick up the car. I wonder how accurate is it
im not there yet but there are a handful of older cars I’ve always wanted (First gen Miata, Z3 etc) that are not THAT inflated in price but I just can’t get myself to volunteer for the ongoing repair headaches. I’m too much of a always-under-warranty-leased-car–slut
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I am planning to buy my 2018 Lexus ES next month. I am basically flushing the NY state tax down the toilet, but I should still have equity when it’s time to sell.
CarMax has been public since 1997 and had it’s first profitable quarter in 1999. It’s not a start up anymore. It’s possible to make it work. Sure Carvana and Vroom are paying a little more for cars than CarMax but not much. How many players can the market support is another question.
But these places have two things going for them. 1 car dealerships keep doing business the old way and 2. too many people still think you are better off buying a used car that someone else has taken the depreciation on.
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Nationwide coverage.
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Can you elaborate on why you’re NOT better off buying a used car that someone else has taken the depreciation on? Thanks.
Yeah I should have been more specific. Nothing wrong with buying a used car someone took a big depreciation hit on. But the key is paying a lot less than you would to buy new.
For the car I am selling back to Carvana next week, pretax, they are giving me about 93% of what I paid for the car new. So they almost certainly have to sell it for more than I paid new or make money on the backend with an inflated APR. Obviously market is hot now but for family sedans someone could get a fairly comparable new car for the same price they are gonna pay Carvana for my three year old car.
And this is a theme at Carvana and CarMax. reliable late model cars with clean Carfax sell for pretty close to what a new model, with a little haggling, would go for. Especially as cars add ever more electronics, I wouldn’t give up the benefit of a full warranty, plus knowing that my car is brand new to save 10% or 20%.
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Question is, did someone actually take the depreciation hit and leave you with a purchase price substantially lower than new?
Even before the pandemic it rarely made sense on cars with strong resale values like Honda, Toyota etc.
The delta between brand new (especially on a leftover and/or when purchasing incentives were strong) and 2-3yr old was usually so small that it made no sense to give up most of the 3/36k new car warranty plus whatever APR special was available for new cars.
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Kinda long story… WG + Nightfall looks amazing in photos and people online keep raving about it. Ditto for Dune Brown nappa leather premium interior on the top trim (SXP).
Regardless of what they’re showing on their websites as “inventory” most dealers are showing in-transit vehicles and not whats physically on the lot. What’s physically on the lot sells out very quickly or is already presold so either way disappears from the lot very quickly.
Happened to luck out and find one of these apparent unicorns in the wild to see for myself. Wasn’t really blown away. Was I expecting too much? Maybe.
I also didn’t like that the DB leather is paired with an almost black interior while the oyster colored leather is paired with a much lighter color. And oyster wasn’t available even to be ordered with WG. So I decided on WG over black or Moss over oyster and I’d let any intel from the dealer about any difference in availability be the deciding factor.
People who custom ordered 3-4 months ago have been getting their SXs now, and some EXPs were even quicker. But dealers are hedging themselves and trying to underpromise/overdeliver. So they’re saying 5-8 months. And as we’ve all seen supply chains are so “optimized” these days that nobody keeps more than X days of components on hand any more. delays of just one critical part is all it takes these days to cause disruptions.
So my innate risk aversion took over. I asked what do you have incoming that’s not already presold? He said they’d have a silver EXP in a month and a black SX in 2. No brainer for me. I can get over the missing features but I can never get over looking at dust and pollen on a black car. Earlier ETA was cherry.
And that, my friend, is how someone who spent several afternoons obsessively looking at colors in person will end up with a color he never even contemplated.
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Looks like the new approach is they’ll honor the price at ordering as long as you don’t actually want to take delivery.
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I saw that yesterday, but since it wasn’t positive toward Tesla (like we all must be, because we are usually so mean to poor Elon by sharing the news) I didn’t post it.
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It’ll be interesting to see if they start delivering previous orders after they get past the next quarterly financial review; i.e. are they just strong arming customers for extra money or is this a “creative” ploy to boost quarterly revenues, not that Tesla has ever done anything “creative” when the quarterly financials are due.
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There is also a scenario where they are affected by shortages, not communicating that fact, and just delivering what is completed out-of-order. The optics are terrible given the price increases and that this is happening at all.
Wouldn’t be too hard to address
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Honestly, you could probably find some equity in cars like these. I’ve seen some people throw away cars because “they’re broken” when all they needed was a cat, spark plugs, or coil packs. Either DIY or find a decent shop and run to them knowing how much it should cost and you can get a decent deal.
I have zero mechanical abilities and zero patience to deal with little things that break all the time so equity or not, I can’t get myself to buy an older car, even those I’ve always loved.
Find a shop! You can get a good mechanic for as low as $80 an hour for labor. Most jobs are only 1-2 hours. They just don’t make cars like they used to, go out and enjoy some old fun ones before the electric future completely takes over.
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That could get expensive though even at $80 an hour. And if your enjoyment of the car is going to be outweighed by irritation of having to deal with repairs it may not be worth it. It’s always hard to figure out non-tangible enjoyment factor vs a very tangible money factor.