Most buyers are not in the position to truly be able to walk away. Sometimes that's money, sometimes its emotions, sometimes it is current ride being dead. But when the buyer can walk they get leverage. My last two new car purchases from dealerships were situations where I could walk. The dealerships found a way to get to my numbers and called me back on their own to do so.So about a week ago I get a text from my dealer: let us appraise your car and get you into an upgraded ride. Normally I ignore these, but we think a small SUV might be a better option for us right now than our current sedan. So I did a little research last Thursday and called the guy who sold us our last car and asked him for a ballpark out the door price on a specific model. Being conservative, he put numbers out there that were about 15% higher than I wanted to pay. Getting into more optimistic cases, we were still about 8% apart and didn’t see a way to close a gap that large. I thanked him for his time and thought that was that. I’m ok with my current ride, so I felt no need to push it.
Then I got a dealer text Saturday asking how the phone call went. I replied, recounting the discussion and saying I was happy with my current car and the process.
Then today the sales manager called and offered trade-in and purchase price concessions to get to within 2% of my ask.
So tomorrow we’re going to check out the SUV for the first time. We hope it looks good.
I’m convinced when dealers have enough on the line, they’ll find a way to make the deal.
It’s weird for us because my ideal car purchase involves a trade-in so worn out I breathe a sigh of relief when the car makes it to the dealer. One car actually snapped a half-shaft the night before I had a test drive scheduled.