VW dealer discounts? or Not

odyseus

Hi All,
I have £14K to spend on a used Golf (I am after a GT sport). From past experience I manged to get 5% (roughly £1K) knocked off price of a used car one was a £17K Mitsibushi (Dealer) and one was a £16K Merc (Independant Dealer).
I emailed a coupled ov VW dealers who said they don't give discounts and can't descriminate beween cash buyers (and any other finance).
I emailed one dealer back who then offered a maximum 1.5% discount ofthe asking price of £14990 (that's £250 - wow), I offered a maximum of £14250 - but no deal
Does anyone else have any exeprience on buying a used car from a VW dealer (I did point out that in the current economic climate etc that buyers would not be expecting to pay the forecourt/windscreen prices at dealers)
All the best
John

TiTheRev

Give me some details about the car you want and i'll see what I can do. I am not a salesman for VW but do know one, so I can let you know...

Any preference on spec? Leather/AirCon etc...

Where you from and will you pay cash or want finance?

odyseus

Hi there,
The particular car I was interested in was at Citygate VW High Wycombe. It is a 2007(57) Golf GT Sport Tdi (170) 5-door in Shadow blue, (A/C is standard) cloth interior, mileage 4397, price £14990 (As I said I offered a maximum of £14250). There are similar examples at the same price at the Ruislip and Watford dealers. Unfortunately, I live on the south coast between Portsmouth & Southampton so they are a fair trek (hence my attempts to get a good price before I travelled).
What would be nice to know is what sort of price reduction could i reasonably expect to get..I got the usual 'we have are margins to think about etc,etc' but is seems quite odd that they are not willing to drop the price of this car by £750 to make a sale. (The Petersfield dealer refused to give any discount, end of story)
All the best
John

TiTheRev

Due to the 'credit crunch' cars are being offered on the forecourt for less money and margins are lower. Some dealers may honestly not be making £750 on a car, especially with that low mileage.

You're not that far from where I may be able to find you a car, i'll let you know, probably via PM so as to stay within forum rules!

DealDrivers_company_representative

We posted a new batch of used VW's up on our site 2 days ago..loads of Golf's (http://www.dealerstock.co.uk/html/used_vw.html), but you should also note that VW have just put a £650 bonus on any GT Sport brand new stock that can be registered by end of September (we posted some 5dr diesels 2 days ago on this page to give you an idea of brand new prices using this new deal.. http://www.dealerstock.co.uk/html/all_vw.html ), the bonus is on top of the dealer's own discounts...and at the same time they've increased deals on new Jetta and Touran stock for September registrations.

On Golf GT Sport anything built this year should have leather on as standard, as a rule, anything built prior Jan/Feb would have cloth trim.

Hope that helps..there's a lot of deals hitting the market now on cars which can be registered in September.

We have been permitted to post here since May 06.

TiTheRev

Sounds like he knows more than me!

There's nothing available at those prices at the moment, but will keep an eye out for you..

Hintza

OP I think you are looking at this the wrong way. I know nothing about the car you want but you are assuming that all dealers are still over pricing cars ready for the haggle factor. In these economic conditions they might not be.

All you can do really is lots of research and determine what the best price will be. Once you roughly know that then you can go into the dealer and tell them what you are willing to pay. If they don't want to deal then you just walk away.

OK you might want to factor in a couple of hundred pounds in hassle value just to save yourself time and effort and possibly cost of travel but stick to your guns, remeber every month the car sits on the forecourt it is costing the garage interest and depreciation.

Have fun.

OrangeProse

I used to work for a VW dealership a few years ago.

The official line was 'we don't give discounts' as at the time, admitting that you could haggle on a VW was seen as potentially damaging to the brand. This is probably still the case now, as VW has slowly attempted to reposition itself upmarket over the last few years.

However, getting discounts is certainly possible, although the inner workings of car dealerships can be quite complex and they tend to differ from group to group.

If you know what you want and the dealership have one in, go and see it. You're in a much stronger position to haggle face-to-face than asking over email, to which the answer will ALWAYS be no. No sales manager is going to open up the possibility of blanket reductions based on an email query from one customer.

Try going near the end of the month. If the sales people are desperate for sales before the end of a period, you might again be in a stronger position. And when I say the end of the month - I don't mean 5.15pm on the 31st. Try around the 28th, so they know they've got a couple of days to push the paperwork and legal stuff through before month end. For example, with the car you mentioned, you could try going back today and waving £14375 at them and see what wiggles.

Like Hintza said, get a few valuations so you know what you should be paying, what you want to pay and what you absolutely won't go above. Stick to those figures and be firm, polite and don't try to rationalize from the salesperson's perspective i.e. by mentioning the credit crunch, or mentioning that the car will be losing money as long as it sits on their forecourt - they hate that! They know all this already, and it's useful for you to know but it won't help you to start talking about it.

It all comes down to the money so try your luck, if it doesn't work you can simply walk away. Make sure they have your mobile number so they can ring you back if they decide they want to move on it - it's all part of the game.

The other thing is try a few different dealers, from different groups. You might find one who happens to have a bit more margin in a particular car for whatever reason, who'll be happy to strike a deal that the first dealer wouldn't touch.

Hope this helps!

in51der

odyseus wrote: »

Hi All,
I have £14K to spend on a used Golf (I am after a GT sport). From past experience I manged to get 5% (roughly £1K) knocked off price of a used car one was a £17K Mitsibushi (Dealer) and one was a £16K Merc (Independant Dealer).
I emailed a coupled ov VW dealers who said they don't give discounts and can't descriminate beween cash buyers (and any other finance).
I emailed one dealer back who then offered a maximum 1.5% discount ofthe asking price of £14990 (that's £250 - wow), I offered a maximum of £14250 - but no deal
Does anyone else have any exeprience on buying a used car from a VW dealer (I did point out that in the current economic climate etc that buyers would not be expecting to pay the forecourt/windscreen prices at dealers)
All the best
John

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I don’t know what dealers you are calling, but the VW network is awash with gt sport tdi’s as the mk 6 is due out in Jan 09. The latest car also has from 08 onwards leather as standard, you may pay a bit more of a premium for a 170 ps but from where I have looked I have seen a grey 57 plate 15k for £14,850 and I know of a few 0857 140 ps cars that are going for £14,500 I would suggest going on the internet and searching for the car you are after and speaking to each dealer individually, there will be a deal to be had and you can always negotiate for them to deliver to you, it is a buyer’s market, however just consider this; it wasn’t more than 3 months ago that an 0757 golf gt sport tdi would have made approx £16,500 retail so a lot of dealers are pricing their used car stock to “go” meaning they have already discounted their cars to turn their stock in a challenging market, Our advice is persevere if you are flexible with colour and spec you should get a great example for £14,000, try the London VW dealers as there are more of them over a smaller radius meaning more competition!
Hope this helps

odyseus

Thanks for all your advice guys. It would appear that I'll probably have to wait. I did get one of the dealers ring me today (High Wycombe, Citygate) who suggested that if I gave a £1K deposit (over the phone) they would use their used car buyer to find something close to what I want ie TDI(170) for the maximum price I was going to spend £14250. I haven't gone through with this as it does tie me down to this particular dealer, plus I suspect it's some form of sales tactic?? In any case my ideal car was the one they had for £14990, to which they dropped to £14750 and I offered £14250. As one of the posters suggested, you can probably haggle a bit more at the dealer, except that this particular dealer is a 1.5 hour drive from me - I wanted to ensure that if I like the car I can buy it!
I think that as the new 58?? registration is out on Wednesday, then I believe that this will lower older registrations plus there will be many part exchanges on offer - so I will probably sit tight for the moment!
Cheers
John

in51der

odyseus wrote: »

Thanks for all your advice guys. It would appear that I'll probably have to wait. I did get one of the dealers ring me today (High Wycombe, Citygate) who suggested that if I gave a £1K deposit (over the phone) they would use their used car buyer to find something close to what I want ie TDI(170) for the maximum price I was going to spend £14250. I haven't gone through with this as it does tie me down to this particular dealer, plus I suspect it's some form of sales tactic?? In any case my ideal car was the one they had for £14990, to which they dropped to £14750 and I offered £14250. As one of the posters suggested, you can probably haggle a bit more at the dealer, except that this particular dealer is a 1.5 hour drive from me - I wanted to ensure that if I like the car I can buy it!
I think that as the new 58?? registration is out on Wednesday, then I believe that this will lower older registrations plus there will be many part exchanges on offer - so I will probably sit tight for the moment!
Cheers
John

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OK you may be infested to know that on a new model at present you will get 10% discount plus there is a further £650 off, however if you can hang on till 3rd week of September you should get that deal, make sure you monitor that car on the internet as all these dealers will be under pressure to make way for September trade-ins so you may end up getting it anyway.