I spent all of December trying to get into a 2023 eTron GT at under $1k/mo.
I saw deals posted here well beneath that. There’s a dealer here with 2 in stock today (12/30) that will not budge below $1,300/mo, for vehicles with the same MSRP as those that went for ~$900 this month as posted here.
What’s the deal? Why do others get these deals but the dealerships I speak with are lightyears away from making the same deals on the same cars?
Different dealers have different business models. Some chase gross, some chase volume. Sometimes they let something go cheap because theyre trying to hit a step goal to get a large bonus.
Maybe they have plenty of allocations so don’t need to move the cars as badly as the others? not sure
Some of the best deals in the country are posted on LH
its very rare for you to walk into your local dealer and replicate, most dealers aren’t interested in doing massive blowouts when local customers don’t require it or competition among dealers is lower
Are you proposing a deal to the dealer or just asking them, “what’s the best you can do on this car?” There’s the theory of FOLP (Fear Of Low Payment). eTron GT is a very expensive car and most dealers probably just can’t wrap their head around a sub $1k/mth lease unless there is significant DAS. You’re going to have to cast a wide net and you’re going to have to be the one proposing the deal to the dealer. And make it very clear that if they accept your deal you will come in today to sign.
Why would they? They are reasonably confident that they can sell it for thousands more to someone else.
Not every store wants to chase the bottom feeders of the market.
if you ask them their model upfront, are the sales people likely to tell you?
In my experience just look for the stores with the lowest google reviews, they will have the cheapest prices.
Stores with high csi, great reviews and customer advocates have higher selling prices.
Same reason why Amazon charges more over competitors for some items, it’s what people will pay for. I got a q5, a couple local dealers said no way, to me, then I literally saw 2 Q5s today with temp tags and one of those dealers brackets. They sold the numbers they wanted to at more money probably. They don’t care about people like us. I used to live in the Midwest I had 1 dealer of most brands in 70 mile radius. I had almost all of my cars happily delivered from over 250 miles away. Local dealers never cared.
Oh really?
It really doesn’t matter. Establish a target deal, make an offer, and if they say no, move on.
The lower the profit, the lower the customer satisfaction scores.
This has been proven over DECADES
Yes, that’s what I’ve been doing. “Meet these numbers and I will drive the car home today.”
A Quick Look at swapalease dot com will show that profit maximization works on a lot of people.
Why sell at 10% off at buyrate MF when someone might pay sticker at .00040 over, plus multiple FI products?
My two cents, take it for what it’s worth I’m not an expert in the car market.
Car purchasing is a structurally somewhat inefficient market with mediocre price discovery mechanisms. The reason for this is that dealerships are an regulated oligopoly, and maybe to some extent that manufacturers are too but I tend to think of that as reasonably competitive. With the lack of competition on a limited supply of cars, dealers are able to engage in a high degree of “price discrimination” via obfuscation (exploration of information imbalance) where they sell the same product at many different prices to different consumers differentiated by price sensitivity and how educated they are on the market.
It’s frustrating as a consumer because it’s very difficult to “just pay the market price” on a car in many cases. It’s not like grocery shopping, it’s not really like the stock market. It’s a bit more like house buying.
An oligopoly would make price discovery easier. The problem is the opposite: fragmentation.
Last I checked there were 17,000+ dealerships and the largest single owner owned less than 500.
I mean the market spoke about flat pricing.
Scion tried it
Saturn tried it
Guess what happened to those brands.
I get you are being sarcastic
Saturn customers loved the flat pricing. It was killed by GM internal politics
Their brand csi was LOWER than Pontiac. What are you talking about?