Hi, I’m first time leaser. This site has been phenomenal to get a handle on the negotiation. I see a few deals where folks are working with dealers outside their area. How is transport of the vehicle handled? Does anyone negotiate shipping the car to them or a local dealership? I’m in socal seeing great prices up north. But a 500mile drive back with an EV doesn’t justify the deal. Any suggestions?
in my experience, the dealer doesn’t get much better of a shipping price than you could get if you used a shipping broker like uship.com. As a matter of fact a lot of times they get a worse rate. They are likely not going to absorb the cost but build it into your payment if that’s what you want so either way you’re paying for it. Sometimes if it’s a chain of dealerships and they have a dealership in both locations they can transport between those two for very little money but that’s most likely not the case.
Also, and i can speak from experience, not all dealers will just ship you paperwork to sign and put a car on the truck, they require you to sign in person. Penske owned dealerships in particular won’t do that, others might not either so you will have to ask if it’s even possible.
In any case, you live in a highly competitive market and i’d be surprised if you couldn’t replicate a deal in SoCal that others are getting in NorCal.
I think it depends on the dealership. When we leased our Nissan Leaf, the dealer in Maryland was a high volume operation that had their own fleet of flatbed delivery trucks. When I thanked the driver for being willing to drive several hours south to drop off our car, he told me his previous drop off was all the way down to Florida (from Maryland). They rolled the $100 delivery fee into my lease.
HK
Thanks! Besides trying to get a local match on out of area deals, I’ll check uship.com and dealers with heavy internet sales.
Well, the first thing you need to make sure is that your car has been transported safely and functioning properly.
I agree with @305Hackr that a dealer does not get much better for a shipping price than using a shipping broker like Uship, We Will Transport It, CalShip and much more. Last month my brother had transported his new car from Palm Springs to New York by hiring an auto transport Palm Springs service which was provided by We Will Transport It, team, where his transportation cost was on a cents-per-mile based location.
Well, I think before you transport your car make sure to search online and got through with some blogs about transportation and how the costs are being calculated.
Just remember that the cost of shipping to a dealer is literally asking them to reach in their pocket. Negotiating on the car is not. Best case for you if you are the places others have listed on here. End of day you will end up paying for it out of pocket. Make sure you do open trailer it is the cheapest option. Enclosed is not necessary.
If negotiations will not work out, you can always try to minimize the costs to absolute minimum. For example you can try to list the car on https://clicktrans.com/ and by the reverse auction method find a transport provider that will offer you the lowest quote on the shipment. Usually this way you can reduce the costs by over 40%