How do you go about buying a new car?

H

h8c18

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Jan 15, 2015
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Copenhagen
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Mercedes A, Renault RS, Peugeot diesel
Hi there everyone,

I am really curious to hear from all of you how you go about buying a new car. Do you go online, ask friends, go to dealerships and cross shop, tear out a page of a magazine and rush to said brand or whatever is your process?

I am asking this because I spent 4 years of my life building a system which would supposedly make everything awesome when we buy new, regardless if you know more than the sales person or if you only know a color you like.

I came about this issue when I encountered a problem buying my first car. Keen on a BMW 330ci I knew exactly what to get but had no information of what was available to buy today. I spent weeks hunting down the BMW network to find one and by the time I managed to travel across the country to see it, it had been sold and on sheer demotivation I ended up buying a 325ci on the spot. Which turned out to be a fantastic car. Many more times, or every time I wanted a new car, I did not want to wait for it. In particular I remember starting work for a company who wanted to buy me a car myself and being too busy with the new job and all I had the dry accountant picking me a standard car.
This gave me some irritation because we can find almost any used car online but the primary cars and authorised dealerships who sell them are being extremely restrictive as to what is on stock and coming in soon.

The solution I came up with was an online market place for authorised dealerships to showcase what's on stock, what's coming in during the near future and eventually I will get the reverse auction up and running. We built a concierge service so if you do go to a dealership or call them, they can wrap a couple of cars together for you and save them to your myGarage (What we call the parking feature, hopefully it is self-explanatory) so you can look at them with financing at home, during the weekend, at work etc.

It would be great to hear from all of you how you buy cars today or how you would like to buy a car in the future. You can also have a look at the site we put together at enatco.pl (it is octane in reverse if you are wondering).

Look forward to hearing what you all think.
 
I bend over and ask the salesperson to be gentle.
 
I walk in, talk to my favorite salesperson who I have been dealing with for years. He gives me a special discount t because I'm such a good customer: not one penny above sticker price. What a guy!

All kidding aside, I already kind of know what kind of car I would buy next, so I would just go through some online sources to put together the options list that I want, then contact the dealer or two or three. Once I find the car that I want, possibly in multiple dealerships, I will either ask them for their best price or I might possibly bring in an average sale price from an online source like true car or Edmunds.com's TMV. I don't want to fight to get an average price. I'm okay with paying the average price, but I don't want to pay more than average?not worth my stress/energy to squeeze another hundred or two out of 'em. Does that make sense?
 
I get an idea about the type of car I want and what kind of budget I have available and then spend about a year researching, pondering, obsessing, test driving, looking at used cars, talking to friends and asking on forums. It becomes kind of a hobby...

I will probably visit a handfull of dealers to get an offer once I have narrowed down the exact model and spec. I'm not in a rush so I don't mind that it takes a few months to have it made the way I want it.
 
#NecroJoe I understand not pushing the price too much. By taking every $ away from the sales person it will just end up giving us horrible after sales experience.
Would you consider using an online system to configure the right car for you and add it available for all authorised dealerships to give you an offer, or perhaps even alternative models?
 
#M3lover In the nordics, buying a car can be as expensive as a house so a fair amount of research goes in to it :).

The system we developed lets you load all cars and then use the tools to fix your budget, horsepower, fwd/rwd, fuel economy and so forth. *Side note on the tools: We are introducing budget based on financing per month and power to weight ratios so you can find the best performance car in your monthly budget. In particular this is helpful with the new financing options available on the market. From there you can see what is available. Have a look at this video which has a short demo of the system in use: https://vimeo.com/115534180 (it is in Polish but I am sure you will get the drift)
Would this be useful in your case?
 
are most cars made on demand these days?
as in dealers have one or two in stock, but when you order one, the order is forwarded to the factory, and one to your liking is made?

with all the options, wheels and color combo's you can get these days, it's almost impossible to make them in advance...
 
I've only ever bought 1 new car - my Mustang. Since I work for the OEM it was a rather painless process since I get a certain set discount off MSRP and thats it. The only hard part was settling on a trade value for my TT, which took about a month and 3 different dealers.
 
bone said:
are most cars made on demand these days?
as in dealers have one or two in stock, but when you order one, the order is forwarded to the factory, and one to your liking is made?

with all the options, wheels and color combo's you can get these days, it's almost impossible to make them in advance...
Click to expand...


I don't think so. I believe most people buy a close approximation of what they want off the lot or pay a bit extra for the pleasure of getting exactly what they want.
 
NecroJoe said:
I walk in, talk to my favorite salesperson who I have been dealing with for years. He gives me a special discount t because I'm such a good customer: not one penny above sticker price. What a guy!
Click to expand...

Ah, nice to see ya again, Hank! :mrgreen:


Yeh, more to the topic, i'm mostly restricted to variants on the day. (due to there's fewer great cars ...in'theweeeeurld(c)) (and much fewer of them in R.F.) (...aand certainly not every "great" car is great-enough for my taste....) Make that "we'll notify you when the model's available, sir".

So basically when i'm on like 60% amount of money needed, i start checking on the net for what's new. Cause you can't be sure one day it's there sitting and waiting for like.... few months and second day you come over to them and it's been sold just an hour ago.

The bird was the only '92 in the damn country, so.. i rather skipped the thinking and swallowed the cheese.
 
A new car? I know what I want, so I walk in, walk to the display model, wait for someone to ask what they can do for me, and say "Sell me this."

A used car? Much the same thing, but involves a lot of time on Craigslist and similar trying to find the thing that I want, awkward phone calls with strangers who have no idea wtf a steering wheel is, and showing up with a truck, trailer and wad of hundred dollar bills.

How do I know what I want?
For the BRZ, I watched the Top Gear episode in which it appeared, turned to the guy next to me and said "Sold." So I walked into the dealership and bought one.
For my trailer, I needed a roughly 18ft flatbed wood decked trailer. So I walked into the dealership and bought one.
For the Ram? I needed a 3/4 or 1 ton diesel truck. So I did the Craigslist dance.

Everything else was either an impulse buy or I was too young to make my own decisions anyway.
 
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The car buying process is usually triggered by me seeing something I like. For example, when I bought my first generation Yaris, it's because I had a look at the dashboard while waiting around for my Corolla to be serviced.
With my XV, it was love at first sight when I saw one at the dealership.

If I don't have a good feeling about the dealer, I'll go somewhere else. This happened when we went to a big Hyundai dealer to look for something for my mother. The guy was such an obnoxious prick, there was no way we'd have bought a car there. This is how we ended up at the Mitsubishi dealership where we recently bought my wife's Lancer as well.
I also prefer smaller dealerships, where it's the owner who does the selling rather than a salesperson. But I know that's not really rational. As evidenced by the aforementioned Hyundai dealer. Good service will ensure my loyalty more than big discounts.

The waiting times for Japanese cars are very long indeed nowadays. I lucked out with the XV, they managed to pull one from another dealership. Otherwise it would have been a six month wait.
 
Depends on the situation really.

What I'd like to do :

- find a make/model I like and configure it online to the exact spec I want
- print out online offer, take it to local dealer #1 and haggle price
- take dealer #1s offer to dealer #2 to see if they can do better
- go back to dealer #1 and ask him what else he can do.
- place order to whichever dealer gives me the best deal
- wait 4 months
- get the exact car I wanted and be happy forever

What I actually do :

- Drive my current car until it breaks and/or is diagnosed with terminal or expensive faults
- see whatever the hell they have in stock that roughly is what I need (in this case, 5 doors, air con and a decent stereo were all the requirements, I got a dull colour but nice alloys and window tints as a bonus)
- buy whatever they have because I can't be without a car for more than a few days...
 
Never bought a new car. Up until recently, I had no idea you could haggle on a new car. It seems so foreign to me. I get why you would on a used car because there's usually worn out stuff that costs money therefore should mean you can get the car for less. For a new car, everything works so, what's there to haggle on?
 
How much you like paying for a vehicle.
 
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