Haggling Heaven: Your feedback on haggling for cars

Former_MSE_Archna

This thread is to feedback your successes and failures when haggling for a car and relates to the Car Buying Cost Cutting article

To discuss the article: click here

fagun

We've just bought a Verso from a Toyota Dealer. The best price we could get on the internet was from drivethedeal (well we found a better offer but the seller had a bad reputation).

The dealer allowed us to borrow the car for half a day and matched the price - but wouldn't budge to offer any more. The deal will save us (including some fancy footwork with a £1000 discount if you take out finance) around £2700 - on an almost £19,000 car.

We tried (on the phone) with other Toyota dealers - one, we'd visited, and one suggested by a frined in the leasing business. Neither was interested.

Sinclair_scott

I just bought a new Vauxhall Zafira Design 1.8 for £13,340 from http://www.discountcarshop.co.uk/
the List price was £18,095 a Massive saving of £5090.

You pay £500 deposit the remainder on delivery.

It arrived today.

They by in bulk an pass the saving on to you.

Car is deliverd from a UK Main Dealer.

Regards
Scott
http://img.moneysavingexpert.com/smilies/sport-smiley-001.gif
:j

Mel123_2

We have just bought a new Honda Civic. As the car has only been out for 6 months I found it very difficult to get anyone that was prepared to offer any sort of discount even though 'What Car' suggested that £500 was a reasonable deal to expect from haggling. The best that was suggested was bundling in 5 years of servicing (worth £500). Anyway DrivetheDeal and UKNewCars both offered about £1K discount and within 24 hours both local dealers have matched this offer despite protestations of 'no margin', 'not allowed to by Honda' etc etc. (and offered an acceptable trade in deal for my very old, too-much-trouble-to sell-privately car - most of the websites wont offer this) I'm not a good negotiator so was very pleased with this result - Martins site and quite a bit of web research really paid off.

indiegirl_2

I've used the internet vs dealers approach before - to my benefit.

I researched my car's price thoroughly, gaining quotes and getting delivery times for the exact specification I wanted, before approaching two local dealers to me with the lowest quote I had.

I went with the phrase: "obviously, I'll be paying these brokers a proportion, but I would much rather that money went to my local dealership instead of the broker and a dealership somewhere else in the UK"...

The first place I went to couldn't believe the quote but after a bit of umming and ahhing, they decided that they would match it with no quibbles. I then attempted to play them off against another fairly local dealer, who was having none of it and told me I'd be lucky to get any dealership to match my online quotation.

Went back to the first place, agreed the price and a trade-in for our knackered Punto, and the deal was done.

This was for a Nissan, and at the time I was in the South West of England and travelled probably 25miles between the two dealerships. In total, off of list price, I saved almost £3500.

It did make me think though... if companies are prepared to match online deals, what on Earth must they make on outright sales??

One thing I also noted was that it made a difference as to when I went in. I tried to get my F-i-L to get a similar deal at a different time of year, and no one would get anywhere near what I paid for the same car.

I visited in the last week of September, when the new registrations were out and (I think) dealers were starting to fall short of their sales targets...

I'll do it again in a couple of years when I buy again :beer:

whitehat

I've just replaced my 11yr old pug 106D banger. We decided on a Toyota Yaris and decided to go for a nearly new, rather than brand new, to save on the initial depreciation hit. Looking for 1yr old low mileage cars there were very few private one available so we looked through a few supermarkets also.

We decided to head to our local main Toyota dealer to view a few cars they had for sale, also as it was only 4 days before the end of the month I thought this would be a good time to haggle for a deal and get the car off their books before the end of the month.

As we do around 17k miles/year, mostly motorway, we were looking for a diesel. New price is around 11k, best we could find on the internet was £10600. We found a 1yr 7500miles one owner car, on the dealers list for £8800. As the car we were trading in was a complete banger they would only do £200 for it.

Without too much haggling we managed to get £1k off the asking price, the salesman did have to check with the manager for this. This was good, but not quite good enough for me. Pushing even harder, and as we were able to take the car before month-end, we managed to get an extra £150 on the trade-in price, and a full tank of diesel (the salesman did have to speak with his manager again!). The whole haggling process did take a bit of time, and when we got to the final price I went for a further £50 off, just to seal the deal!

So a £1200 saving on a nearly new from a main dealer, not bad me thinks.

The_Biff

Re Whitehat's deal above: Is the road fund licence included ion the second hand price? - as it always is in the new price.

morgana

I've just bought myself a Toyota new model Yaris. Thanks to this site I used brokers4us and overall, after some haggling got £ 1,345 off the price, plus £ 100 off the paint sealant treatment. As a driving instructor I was also hoping the get a deal on the fitting of dual controls (the ones on the old model Yaris don't fit the new one) Toyota have a Driving Instructor Programme dept but have no offers on this year and the last 3 quarters of 2006 (so what this dept does I don't know !) As I was getting up to leave I said to the salesman "Oh, I need some floor mats too. You'll throw those in FOC too, won't you?" He looked surprised but said yes
So thank you for the advice here, but it's worth asking the brokers you suggest, before talking to the dealer as they admitted afterwards that the prices quoted on the web site were out if date by around £ 500.

Still, a good saving on the price of my first brand new car. I can have a nice holiday with those savings...............better look at your tips for savings on those too now

morgana

Oh and I took a 2 day test drive in the new model demonstrator Xmas week even tho I knew it was what I wanted.My present Yaris has done 75,000 as a driving school car on the same clutch and with only ever new brake pads needed at services. The new one has a 3 year warranty. That is my sort of car !!

nickmack

whitehat wrote:

Without too much haggling we managed to get £1k off the asking price, the salesman did have to check with the manager for this. This was good, but not quite good enough for me. Pushing even harder, and as we were able to take the car before month-end, we managed to get an extra £150 on the trade-in price, and a full tank of diesel (the salesman did have to speak with his manager again!).

The majority of the time, the speaking with their manager is part of the charade that they're really doing their best for you. A Salesperson generally have quite a bit of room to manouvere

Doozergirl

I used Martin's article back in September to great effect. We bought a brand new Mercedes using broker4cars. Not only was it £2000 less than any local dealer could offer us, but it also came with 'extra' extras than our original spec and arrived within 2 weeks straight from a Mercedes Main Dealer.

The wonderful thing using all the websites is that you can play everyone off against each other because you genuinely have cheaper quotes - it is a lot easier than a plain old haggle.

We've been using the article again to buy a brand bew Ford Focus and have managed to knock serious money off the list price, beat even Ford's employee priviledge scheme hands down, but we also checked the local car supermarkets and have found two cars, less than a year old with ridiculously low mileage and more than £5000 off the list price. Going to see them tomorrow, so fingers crossed.