One thing I’ve noticed is that the best deals generally come from large dealerships. Not surprising as they probably get the best discounts from the manufacturers.
Does anyone know any data sets that include dealerships and some measure of size/volume?
How do you find your dealerships? Is there any easy way to find large ones?
Depends on the region. Not every region will have a so called “Large” dealerships.
Best deals are mostly dependant on one’s knowledge about the car they want to get.
I’m a small dealer. Big discounts 
I’m not saying there aren’t small dealers who give good discounts. But there are a lot of small dealers who will treat you like you’re insane if you try to get them to go below invoice!
Lots of big dealers that will too
Interesting. So is the consensus really that (dealer 
) size is not that important?
Bigger dealers have more opportunities to take a loss because they can make it up with the volume. At the end of the day it is the average which really counts when taking a deep deal.
Don’t you know the age old saying that it’s not about the size of the ship…
Large dealers use their size as a marketing ploy, but you’re not guaranteed stronger discounts.
Dealer by dealer sales data is difficult to get and frankly, it’s very hard to aggregate in a smaller area (some DMAs only have 1 franchise for certain nameplates). You can get DMA, state, region and of course national sales data. But you’re not going to find clean, comparable dealership/rooftop level data.
I don’t know what to think anymore re: big/small dealerships. So my current lease is a S90 from a fairly large dealership. I think I got a 15.5% discount before incentives. I went back to them today looking to get a quote for my sister in law, and they gave me A-Plan pricing. And then tried to tell me it was a good deal!
Every dealership gets the same incentives from the Manufacturer to use to sell you a car. Every dealership will try to maximize profit on every single deal. There are so many factors that can go into what deal you could get on any specific vehicle on any given day in any area.
I thought there was volume-based pricing too. Is that a myth?
It really comes down to numbers. Statistically a larger dealer will sell more cars and of course the probability they will sell at a larger margin as well as products to some clients will allow for more room to do some losers and skinny deals. This is before you consider volume bonuses, etc.
There’s dealers that buck this trend of course and very seldom allow a skinny deal despite carrying undesirable or oddball units past their expiration date.
All dealerships have goals from the manufacturer. Some manufacturers tie bonus money to those goals. Honda does not. I am assuming that goals and bonuses are based on previous performance, demographics, store size, etc. etc.
I have access to PVR reports for other dealerships in my area and you would be surprised to see that many of the larger dealerships are also near the top in PVR. Many customers go there first whether it be in-person or online and believe it will be the best deal possible because of being a 'Volume-Based Store" which they are happy to advertise.
You’re waaaaay overthinking this.
Correlation is not causation. AND
Why wouldn’t you start with the handful of large, publicly traded auto groups, and work from there?
You stole my comment..I had this written since morning & got busy & forgot to hit enter lol
I’ll apologize with pictures
To OP I understand why you think that way, but you don’t have enough data points. Who does? Big dealer groups. Manufacturers. Maybe the captives (though lease is a subset where prices can sometimes skew).
I don’t really think causation vs. correlation applies here. I could care less about the cause if emailing large dealerships is more likely to get me a deal (or less likely).
The real question is: I’m going to email n dealerships. How do I pick them? I am usually biased the towards the larger ones. I am interested in hearing if people think that’s a bad strategy.
