07.03.07
Ready to Lease or Buy a car? Winning Strategies for Playing the Car-Buying Game to Win!
7 ways dealers make you pay extra. Winning strategies for playing the car-buying game to win.
Your goal is to get the best car at the best price. The dealers’ goal should be to help you do this, but too often it’s simply to make as much profit as they can. As a smart shopper, you need to know the common strategies that dealerships use to pad their bottom line–from tricky negotiating tactics to trying to sell you unnecessary extras–and how to avoid playing their game. Consumer Reports’ auto-test staff, which buys more than 50 vehicles a year, has had hundreds of dealership experiences. Following are some of the most common things you could encounter and CR’s advice on how to avoid falling prey to them.
1. Mixing negotiations. Salespeople like to combine the vehicle price, trade-in, and/or financing negotiation, often asking you what you can afford to pay per month. This gives them more latitude to provide a favorable figure in one area while inflating figures in other areas. In the end, this could cost you more overall.
Avoid this trap by negotiating one thing at a time, starting with the price of the car. Approach this as if you were paying cash, with no trade-in. To get the best deal, you should go in with a starting price that’s based not on the vehicle’s sticker price but on how much the dealer paid for it. The dealer invoice price is commonly available on Web sites and in pricing guides, but that isn’t necessarily what the dealer paid. Read the rest of this entry »