New Car Buying Tips

I've been looking to buy a new car. So I thought I'd share my experience on how to buy a new car for the right price, without haggling with aggressive sales men.

1. Research and decide what you want. In general try to narrow down your search to two or maybe three cars that you will consider to buy. I found edmunds.com to be a useful resource on the web to look up car specs and read editor and user reviews.

2. Test drive the cars, to help further narrow down the car make and model that you will be buying.

3. Look up the invoice price, MSRP and actual price of the car. While edmunds provides, what they TMV (True Market Value), I found carsdirect.com to be even more helpful in finding what the car is actually selling for. Note that real price will generally be between invoice price and MSRP, but at times one may be able to buy the car for below invoice price. This is possible because many times manufacturers may be providing special incentives, either directly to the customers or to the dealers (which they are willing to pass on to the customers).

4. Once you have decided which car, and have a ball park idea of the actual price of the car, start getting quotes. No, I would not go from dealership to dealership and bargain with the salesmen. I'd rather ask for quotes online. Use multiple websites, like edmunds, autobytel, carsdirect, dealix etc. Another way is to get a listing of the dealerships within driving distance from where you live and then ask for the quote online from all of them.

There are several reasons for getting the quote online. One, many times car sales people are paid a commission on the sale. This commission is lower (or non existent) for online sale because they have to work less. So you save money. Secondly, you save all the time and energy that you would have spent doing this the old fashioned way.

5. Having already negotiated the price online, all you have to do next is - go pick it !

Note that car prices can be different from time to time and dealer to dealer. For example, a dealer with more overheads, e.g. the one located in the downtown, may be more expensive than the one who is a bit out off the way. Similarly, some dealer may be trying to meet a monthly sales target and may be willing to drop the price lower near the end of the month. Price may also vary seasonally, e.g. the prices may be lower near christmas time, when most of the people are busy and car dealers have very few customers. New model year introduction also results in price cuts for the last year's model.

That's it for now. Hope this helps.

posted by Amandeep 5/23/2006 01:27:00 AM | PERMALINK