This market is hopefully going to make deal-hunters realize that âwhat the dealer paid for the car, minus all the incentives and rebates the dealer can claim on the carâ is not, and has never been, the default starting point for good-faith negotiations.
All the people that say âIâll never buy/lease without at least an X % dealer discountâ are just literally being ghosted by the dealers.
Especially on a lease: the total sum of your payments, compared to the total sum of payments from competing sellers on competitive cars, are all you need to shop a fair deal relative to the market. Always has been true.
Tools to help calculate the dealerâs bottom-line are not less accurate in this market, theyâre just less helpful than theyâve ever been.
Iâm not even talking about imaginary discounts, when prices are deliberately overstated and then, as it were, they make a discount and the person pays the full amount, as planned. Discounts completely shut down critical thinking.
Agreed - benchmarking what dealer discounts based on what we see across the market, with a sprinkle of good timing, in some cases, is the way to go. I have never found âinvoiceâ to be useful when doing my own negotiations.
As to the article, scarcity, whether real or perceived, when hyped up by media coverage, drives people to do foolish things. The gas pipeline hack was a good exampleâŚor the runs on meat during the covid lockdown etc.