Did you recently take on (or consider) a loan of 84 months or longer on a car purchase?
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This total included local ad expenses of $200 on the invoice.
Thinking of giving Brown's a whirl. I'm afraid I'm not 100% clear from your post on exactly what your "out the door" price was:
- was it $20,900 minus $2,100 (trade) = $18,800 out-the-door? (I think this is it)
- or was it $18,800 minus $2,100 (trade) = $16,700 out-the-door?
And, I take it that either price included all of your taxes, tags, and fees, right?
Thanks!
Interesting: Laurel has quoted me $18,803.28 plus TT&F for an M5 Touring auto (no nav). Seems like the best price yet (of three dealers). Thoughts anyone?
Tx!
The first price they quoted me was MSRP + $2000 "market adjustment fee" then the sales guy threw in a $500 buy it today discount. I think he figured out something was wrong when I started laughing out loud.
I had a quote from Arlington Mazda for $19,750 (I think. It's been a while) for a touring, auto with nav.
Then the Laurel guy dropped his price to match. But the 5 he was trying to sell me already had almost 300 miles on it. So I said no.
Now, keep in mind that I bought my touring back in Nov 2005, when the recall was just wrapping up and Mazda hadn't shipped any new 5's over here since Sept. So with the inventory levels back to normal, I'd do the email blast to all the Mazda dealers in the region first.
(to finish the story), so we ended up buy from Winchester Mazda, because Rosenthal tried to low ball me on my trade. They offered me $11,000 for a 04 Mazda3 hatch. Winchester offered me $14,000 for the trade (sight unseen) and their price on the 5 was only $250 more than Roesenthal's price.
It's was a very pretty foliage drive out and back from Winchester that November morning...
If you're in southern California and are looking for a 5, this sounds like a good deal.
I suppose we could have done better but we wanted to get rid of our old car and we knew we didn't want to buy from College Park Mazda.
We just clicked 1000 and we love our "space wagon." :shades:
Cheers.
I'm just starting to get serious about getting a Mazda5 and was curious about your "fax-attack." How do you do that? Can you do the same thing via e-mail? Why is it a good strategy? Also, I know this is probably a dumb question, but I figure I won't learn if I don't ask -- why was it a bad thing to send you home with dealer tags? Why was that a deal-breaker?
Thanks!
It may be possible to use a similar procedure via email (it would have been easier for me), but I chose fax because I thought the dealers would take it more seriously. By taking the time to compose a detailed fax, the dealers knew I was not a casual shopper.
As it turned out, near the end of the negotiation the fleet managers had assigned lower-ranked salespeople to try to win my business. These guys probably don't have email accounts at their fingertips.
I don't know what the dealer was trying to do, but I had warned them up front that I wasn't going to play any games, and it sure seemed fishy. I mean, if they had given their last tag to a previous customer, wouldn't they want to immediately find more? If I was going to hand over my cash, I didn't want to leave that place without closing the deal.
Good luck with your fax attack!
By the way, I forgot to mention that the $17,331 did not include sales tax. I bought in Missouri but live in Kansas and will pay tax when I register the vehicle.
I suspect the bobst method would result in a lower price overall for most folks...
I can email more dealers and get faster responses from their Internet sales managers. Not to mention that it's easier to negotiate via email.
What I've found to work for me is
1. go and test drive a bunch of cars to narrow down the model I want
2. go to the manufacture website (or through edmunds) and email all the dealers within a 50 miles of my house
3. wait for a responses from the internet managers (usually I hear back from them within the hour)
4. neogtiate the pricing
5. go in, test drive my car and do the paperwork
6. go home and enjoy my new car
I don't go into the dealership till all the pricings are negotiated. That way, I'm only in for a short test drive of the car that I am buying and then we're onto paperworks.
I've bought my past 3 cars this way and it's worked really well for me.
But I digress. The reason I posted to this forum was to let people know that good deals are out there on the 5 -- I got almost $1000 below published invoice. How to get there is up to the buyer. He or she has the money and is in control!
Because MOST leads that come in via non-traditional methods are generally not serious compared to walk in customers. This is a big reason that internet salespeople never last.
Don't get me wrong...I'm glad it worked for you and you got a great vehicle!! but I suspect you could have spent the same amount of time and gotten a lower price by using a traditional method.
Can you share any information about your experience with Flood Mazda? I'm going to be looking at their Mazda5 stock in a couple of weeks (I'm out of state right now). Specifics that would be helpful to me:
1) What kinds of fees and charges do they add beyond MSRP (documentation, advertising, etc...)?
2) Did they attempt any underhanded tricks during the buying process?
3) Were the sales manager and salesperson helpful, low pressure, and honest?
4) Any comments on the vehicle service at the dealership (clean work area, helpful service manager, etc...)?
5) How do you feel about the whole purchase process?
Anything you can share about your experience with them would be most helpful to my buying process and greatly appreciated
Thanks,
NE_Michael
But we're also going to consider the restyled 2007 CR-V, yet to come out. We would probably be able to save quite a bit of $$ on the Mazda 5. But since it is a low volume seller anyway, and then on top of that it appears that discounts are substantial - anybody worried that it will have a short run in the U.S. due to low demand, and that we might get stuck with a "rare" and therefore hard to maintain vehicle? We usually keep our cars at least 10 years.
If Mazda could get the mileage up, they would have something. The current CR-V is 2 mpg better on the highway. Hence our desire for the 5speed automatic.
We keep our cars forever and, like lots of others, I'd prefer a khaki/tan interior...and to have the other glitches resolved.
But we test drove a Sport last Wed. We did some email requests for quotes but out of half dozen, got just one serious and careful reply with an actual quote. The rest were calls.
Visited another Rockville MD's Congressional Motors yesterday and test drove the Touring @ 19,550. After some back and forth, dropped the deal on that and switched to a Sport (from another dealer). They agreed to match a competitor's price after I showed them the printout. But still wanted to add freight to everything. Eventually dropped the Sport's freight and later on the Touring we drove. That got us to 17982.
Unlike another Mazda purchase, we were not asked to pay bogus fees,purchase an extended warranty and other tedious stuff.
Anyone know if Mazda sanctions the possibility to swap for another colour. This is in Ontario Caanada.
On my new purchases of NA cars the new mileage was always less than 5km.
Is the high mileage normal for foreign cars?
Now, as to low demand, how many more months of $3 gasoline do you think it will take, before all the people stuck on Hummers and Expeditions, catch on to what the future really holds, and realize their SUVs just make them look dumb, not cool? The 5 is perfectly posed to serve a large US market if people would only wake up and figure it out. We are using ours as the family car, and there are five of us plus a big dog. Yes, a camping trip will need for us to take two cars. What's that, maybe an extra 10 gallons of gas one time? In the meantime, we save that much every single week.
I am old enough to remember the 70s gas crises, and what a bizarre assortment of models were on the market, even advertized, to trumpet gas mileage. Cadillacs with 100hp diesel engines or with 125hp Buick V6s. Ford Squaremont station wagons with 4cyl and 4sp stick. Chrysler New Yorkers with 4 cyl engines. (and a whole lot of other more appealing and sensible cars -- this era was when at least here on the West Coast, Japanese cars first started satisfying large numbers of customers.) I predict that in another year or two, Mazda will have a lot more competition, and will be recognized for being ahead of the game.
All I did on the survey was politely point out that at the agreed delivery time, I was kept waiting alone about an hour or so because the paperwork was not ready, and that the car had not been detailed (which I enjoyed doing myself anyway). I did call this experience "acceptable" or "good" (I don't remember exactly) but no way was it "excellent".
I was willing to let all this go by, but last night the salesman called me on the phone, during dinner, to hassle me about my survey answers! I'm sympathetic he lost money, but, come on, this is total yuck-o as customer experience. I even repeated to him my complete satisfaction with the car itself and its price, and said I had been planning to refer interested friends in the future. But now, I've been told he doesn't want to see any of my friends come in!
I hope he learns, we should all do our venting on the Internet!
No thank you, I decided that your business is not in my best interest as my experience tells me that every time we get someone who is looking to get every cent is not someone I want to do business with. Olympia can have your business (loss)
Sincerely,
Yes and guess who i gave my business to? It was all good anyways since Thurston county has lower sales tax.
I understand that they are open for business to make money, so if they couldn't make a price that low for whatever reason, then they could have just said "No deal". Any word that came after "No deal" is just offensive and unnecessary.
I'm glad that you brought your deal to somewhere else.
Lesson learned? Not all of them are sharks but they are out there.
Here's what we want:
Touring W/Auto, and Navi.
Now the million dollar question. What is our target price before tax, Title and Tag? If the invoice is around $21,000 should I start at $20,000 and see who bites?
Craig
Your certainly welcome to offer anything you want...but if somebody makes an offer that is well below cost you won't be considered a serious buyer.
Think about it....how would you feel if the dealer came back to you at $1000 over MSRP? Games can be played by both sides.
I thought I should share my failed experience. I've been trying to trade-in my 2005 9-2x for a 2006 Mazda5. Went to two dealers. I negotiated a price of 18,200 for a sport auto, but rejected the dealer's offer of 14,500 on my trade. This dealer refused to move up on the trade.
Dealer 2 gave me 15,300 for the trade-in, after some negotiation, but then refused to negotiate down from MSRP for a sport manual! He was willing to throw in $200 worth of options though.
In any event, I left both dealerships without a Mazda5. I think the trade-in was causing some problems. I think I'm giving up. I'm going to wait for more competition from other 6/7 seaters (i.e., the Rondo, Rav 4, and the new Santa Fe), keep my Saab, and wait until my 1997 Altima falls apart (which may be a while because the thing is rock solid).
oh and the previous post about trade-ins is very true - we sold our other car on our own and got more than $2000 more for it than dealers were offering. crazy!
Would that have been Premier Mazda at Georgetown? Thats where we got ours through the AAA car purchase scheme. They were very willing to work a decent deal.