Yesterday I went with my mother to a Subaru dealer to buy a new car. I’ve always hated buying a car. You’re dealing with an outfit whose goal is to get you to pay as much for the car as they can, while you, of course, want to pay as little as you can. But they do this multiple times every day while you do it once every 5, 10 or 15 years, so they have around 5,000 as much experience at such negotiations as you do. It can really be torturous.
Fortunately, the internet has done a lot to unstack the deck. After visiting dealers to test-drive cars you’re interested in, and before going back to make a purchase, you can get clear on exactly what model, trim level and option package you want and what it should all cost. This time I used one of those online services that lets you fill out a form and then forwards your info to multiple dealers who send you quotes on the car you’re looking for.
I used to resist doing that because I didn’t want to deal with all those calls and emails, but then I realized that it was ultimately all to my benefit. After filling out one of those forms earlier this week, I received quotes with discounts off sticker price of between $875 and $2,010 for the same car. That’s a big difference.
We were lucky in that the dealer offering the biggest discount was the only one in the area who had the car my mother wanted in one of the colors she preferred. The tricky part in our case was getting a good price on her trade-in. She bought a car less than two months ago after her old one broke down while she was away for the summer. It needed a new engine, at a cost of thousands of dollars, so she decided to buy a new car. Of course, making such a purchase when you’re stuck without a car is tough, and I wasn’t there to help her navigate the process. Though she wanted a Subaru, for reasons I won’t get into here she ended up buying a Honda HR-V. She soon realized it was the wrong car for her, though not soon enough to simply return it.
Once she got home we began talking about trading in her new car for one she’d be really happy to own. Thus the visit to the Subaru dealer and the question of how much she could get on a trade-in of a 2020 Honda HR-V with 1,000 miles on it.
Before going to the dealer I consulted Kelly’s Blue Book online to find out what we should expect to get for the HR-V, but that model didn’t even appear on their “What is my car worth?” page. I then went to Edmunds.com which listed the car but said it was too soon to say what it was worth. Not enough 2020 HR-V’s had been traded in to make an assessment.
But I was able to look up the trade-in value of a 2020 Honda CR-V, so I calculated what the percentage difference was between the MSRP and the trade-in value of that car, then applied that percentage to the MSRP of the HR-V. That suggested that we should expect to get about $18,000 back on my mother’s car.
It was thus dismaying when the dealer offered us $15,500. I told the salesperson what I’d been expecting and asked why they were offering so much less. He said that one of the wheels had scuff marks on it from rubbing up against a curb. I then looked up on my phone what it would cost to replace a wheel and learned it might be as much as $750. I pointed out to the salesperson that, in light of that, one scuffed wheel didn’t begin to account for the low offer. He asked me how much more they would need to offer in order to sell us a car, and I said it would need to be at least $2,000. He shook his head and said, “I may be able to get you another $500, but I don’t know. Let me go talk to my manager.”
I then did what I’ve discovered is the most prudent, honest and effective thing you can do when you encounter something that doesn’t make sense while purchasing a new car: I told the salesperson that we would need to go home and do some more research, which in this case meant getting trade-in estimates from other dealers. I didn’t say that as a negotiating ploy; it was just the most sensible thing I could think of to do.
But of course it was also an effective negotiating tactic. The salesperson talked to his manager and the manager talked to the appraisal manager, who went out to re-appraise the car. When the appraisal manager came back in he said, “Wait a minute, your car is all-wheel drive, right?” (It was, as the “AWD” affixed to the rear hatch affirmed.) “My guy appraised it as a front-wheel drive. He gave you the wrong price.”
After more out-of-earshot discussions, the salesperson came back and said they were upping the offer on the HR-V to $17,500, exactly $2,000 more than before. He asked us if that was enough to do the deal. I said yes.
Back in August, on the phone with my mother after she’d purchased the Honda, I asked her how she liked it. She said, “Well, it’s OK.” That was a big red flag. This was the first new car she’d ever bought in her life. (My late father, a mechanic and a child of the depression, would never even consider buying a new car.) I was on Cloud 9 after I bought my first new car; how could my mother have ended up with a car she wasn’t thrilled with, I thought? I knew she could afford one she really liked, so when she got home this month I encouraged her to trade up. Now she’s the proud owner of a 2021 Magnetite Gray Subaru CrossTrek, which seems to be the car she wanted all along, though she might not have known it.
Overall, the internet has been a mixed blessing. But what it has done to level the playing field for people buying a new car is definitely a check in the plus column.