Our New Car, and the sales experience

I have been car shopping ALL weekend (which is why I haven’t updated that much this weekend). Its been pretty much horrible. I am not your average car buyer. I sold cars way back when and I come from a sales family. You cant sell a salesperson. Its just annoying. When I go to the car dealership, I usually know what I want, what I want to pay, and that’s about all I want to know. I expect some sales, but dont jerk me around. Give me a price, then let me go look it up and make sure your not screwing me. If your honest, Ill be back, right? Right.

So yesterday we go out at 10am. We don’t get him till after 9pm. We drive a Hyundai, Mazda6, Mercedes C320, VW Jetta, Honda Accord, Honda Civic, and about 5 Infiniti G35s.  We are up at a dealership last night, thats about an hour from our house, that had a bunch of cars I was interested in. But its at night and I really want to see a car in the daylight to see about dings, condition, etc. and we tell the sales guy we would be back today. He doesn’t work today, but we promise him if we do buy, we will call him. He lives about an hour away from his job, so we are not going to waste his Sunday coming out when we were still unsure.

Now, we go back out to the dealership. We just want to testdrive a car we didnt test drive last night. We get a salesguy, we tell him upfront that we have a salesperson but we told him not to come out just for us to testdrive a car. The new salesguy is irritated. “Oh, you have a salesperson? Lets get him”. No, he doesn’t live around here, we told him to NOT come in over for this (he is an old guy, we didnt want to keep him from church or whatever, and he lives an hour away), we just want to DRIVE the car. I am not making someone come over here to DRIVE this car. The new salesguy continues on… “We work on commission” Me: I understand that, but we just want to TESTDRIVE the car. If you don’t want to let us test drive this car, get someone that will. The guy again” I’m just trying to explain that we work on commission and……” Me, cutting him off: Your paycheck is NOT my concern. I want to DRIVE this car. He starts up again. Its like back and forth for about 30 seconds. Me: I don’t want this car anymore. Lets go back.

He then gets out of the car and lets me drive. I like the car. But not more then I like the exact same car next door, in a different color. Now it comes down to two dealerships next door to eachother, same car, equivilent miles, who has the better deal is going to get us really. So my DH goes to one dealership and I go to the other to see the numbers. They make him wait FORTY FIVE MINUTES before bringing him the numbers on the car. They have our car keys from the trade, so he cant even leave.

I had seen the numbers at the other dealership and had eaten an icecream before I walked back to find out nothing had been done at all yet. SO i walked in to the office and said ” Can I have my car keys?” very pointedly.  They give me the car keys, then they get the hint and come out. In the mean time, we had walked outside, found a preying mantis and had taken him over to the bushes. LOL. We were seriously bored. We go inside and they show us the numbers. Do you know they jacked up the price an entire GRAND from last night on the same car and what was on their website, so they could look like they were giving us a “deal”.

We called them out on it. They change it down, but wouldnt give us what we wanted. So my DH says “Can you do X or should we just leave?” and the guy said that he couldn’t, so I stood up and said ok, thanks, bye…and the guy was like, wait a minute, cant we have a conversation? I said, my husband just asked you if you can do that and you said no, so I am leaving. I picked up my keys, took my trade next door, and started working that deal.

In the mean time, the guy comes down to the number we wanted, but I was gone already. My Dh comes over and this new dealership is working out the deal. We hit them with what we wanted, they gave it to us, we bought it. While we are there working out our numbers, the dealership from before calls us THREE TIMES on my husbands work cell. They called once to tell us they could beat the deal we were working, then they called again and we ignored the call, so they called on a DIFFERENT number to trick us into answering, and tell us that they now NEED the car we are trading in.

It was sales tactic, after dirty tactic. I was so pissed. Even my DH was getting mad, and he is the most patient person in the world.

Anyway, this is the car we ended up with, and i love it. We have had our Mazda 626 since Dec 2000 and my wonderful DH has faithfully driven it so we did not have to have two car payments. But now he does so much traveling, I was constantly worried about a car with 97K miles on that is 10 years old.

Isn’t it weird how you feel guilty about trading in a car though? I felt guilty about leaving my old reliable car for a new one, but here we go………..introducing, the new family car: