So hanging up your apron and retiring from this forum? I will pay for the cake!
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I agree…Ive been looking for the past few weeks and I have ceased polling dealers for literally anything. $550/mo 3 series BMW do not float my (or anyone else on this forum’s) boat.
Short of some reasonable broker postings here, and the occasional dealer giveaway (like the @ethanrs Trax yesterday), its probably not worth the effort. The diligence that has paid off in the past will only have a relative level of success currently. The way to go now IMO is to try find a good lease swap. I found one yesterday and am starting the process tomorrow.
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We need to make the holiday car sales thread a sticky…
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Agreed. Getting my RDX was a slog with many citing market conditions as their rationale for not being more competitive. I think for the current market I did as well as I could.
I’d say this is true. The last couple years, hacking cars from several brands like MB, BMW, Hyundai, etc was insanely easy. A lot of the deals I’m squeezing for family and friends right now are right around 1% and these are the same vehicles that I was hacking for 0.5-0.75% not that long ago. Some of the same sales folks, too. Hopefully that changes next year 
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You mean that the Trax isn’t a unicorn right now, even by pre-covid standards ? /s
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This thread could also be called, “predictions from early April about how manufacturers and dealers would handle COVID came true”.
And as we also recommended back then, the only reason to shop was because you needed a car.
Tacomas and Tundras (until they were gone), and Volvo deals in May and June were better than I expected. Likewise with eTrons. And as other’s mentioned @ethanrs’s Trax fire sale and a few others people snagged along the way. The trend with few exceptions was higher priced metal moving, which is exactly why manufacturers have leasing to begin with.
I’m surprised we’ve had as many as we did, and this disruption will probably last the rest of this year.
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That^^^^^^
Skip buying unless its necessary.
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Id say that one at $150/mo effective probably would be a deal in most all circumstances. I think there were some (maybe Encore?) that were in the $100-150 range a couple of years ago.
My thread planting seeds?
I so got screwed, was looking to pick up a loaner pre lci m550 or m5 and now the production dropped, big rip. Oh well you win some you lose some.
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Hey @jeisensc, IDK about you, but I’m just enough of a jerk to be able to say “Told ya so” with a smile, to the legions of those who pretty much told us we were full of shit.
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I’m less smug about being right that car business turned out as expected (educated guess on my part), more-so about arguments the first week of March that a vaccine would be here “in a few weeks”. Almost 5 months later, we are at least that far from someone getting a shot in the arm - but that came from years of experience (Swine flu and other clinical trials and research) in work I don’t do anymore.
I’m wrong a lot, but I will usually offer some kind of confidence measure with a prediction. Nobody here is an expert or has a crystal ball, but some predictions are better than others.
The jerk in me started replying to max that this should be called “the I told you so superthread”, and then I tempered it just a little.
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Just like toilet paper, good deals will return lol
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I got a chuckle out of all those people who said cars would be given away for 
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I just rolled my eyes 
at those. It was the next two months of “I’m expecting a fire sale and every dealer is trying rob me blind” where I mostly LOL’ed.
The last two months have been the other way around! As they say, turnabout is fair play.
I needed a SUV and a truck. The BMW dealer I usually lease is not even responding to my emails. When I spoke to him last time, he mentioned he is not allow to discount more than 5% on SUV’s due lack of inventory. It cost me $5k to $10k more to lease car SUV than what it used to be.
It seems used car prices have done up a lot. Instead of return my Mercedes gls to dealer, I traded in to carmax and got $4k more than the residual value. Which was a surprised, before Covid, the trade in value was actually $4k less than the residual.
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I disagree, I actually got the best deal I’ve ever got on a car and just signed yesterday. It may have been a unique situation with a dealer and I got lucky but 1/4 of the ones I contacted had good deals and better than most broker deals on here.
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