dealer
Buying a new car 1776Jerr Some people take the whole car-buying experience much too personally. The key to successful negotiations is to keep your cool, and be ready...
The "actual invoice" is NOT what the dealer pays for the vehicle, that's the whole point.
There can be literally thousands of dollars between dealer cost and invoice (actually there are cases where it's over $10,000. It's all a game to make people think that when they are able to purchase "at invoice" (ar a couple of hundred over or under invoice) that they've gotten some sort of a terrific deal that they can brag to their friends about.
For example, let's look at the last Camry I purchased.
MSRP: $20728 Factory Invoice: $18531 We Paid: $168 plus 188
And this was not a price that was haggled down to, it was "all in stock at this price," and there were a LOT in stock (more than twenty). This was not the end of the model year, and this was not on a model that was not selling well.
Buying a new car 1778And what if someone else, in a different area does the same job that you do for less...
$18,531 was NOT the dealer's cost. The dealer was getting a $1000 factory to dealer incentive, plus there was the holdback, the TDA (money paid to the dealers by Toyota to pay for advertising), and WFR (money paid to the dealer by Toyota to cover the financing of the inventory). The net dealer cost appeared to be around $16,600. So for $388 between dealer cost and the sales price, the dealer wasn't covering his overhead, but he counted on selling financing, warranties, and dealer installed options, where the big money is. This is why they tried to renege on the deal, after the contract was signed, when we didn't go for any of that stuff.
Don't think that the factory to dealer incentives are only for the slowest selling models that nobody wants, or only happen at the end of the model year. Companies like Toyota and Honda believe in keeping their factories going at full capacity, and adjusting prices to stimulate the demand necessary to not end up with unsold inventory.
Buying a new car 1777house salesman's It certainly does make a car salesman a thief, if he sells a car for...
In California anyway, the invoice price has become the de-facto price to start negotiating down from, for all but the least knowledgable buyers, unless the vehicle is one of the very, very few models that are actually in short supply.
