New Car Purchase Help (Update Purchased!)

[Gugny]

21 minutes ago, LeviF91 said:

New car dealers are moving more and more towards the "store" model.  There are some holdouts still but many will not negotiate the sticker on the car without you sticking a competing offer in their face.  Trading in sucks for the reasons already noted upthread.  If you're buying a new car your best bet is to just find out exactly (down to the color, trim, extras) what you want and then look for that car specifically.  Then find the best deal and see if other dealers will beat it.  Rinse and repeat until you get a bunch of "no" then pull the trigger.  The brokers essentially do this for you but they have the connections and pull to fast-track the process.

 

There's more wiggle room with used cars because, also as noted upthread, they absolutely murder people on the trade-ins.  I got my CPO Impala, that was advertised at $17k, out the door for $14.5k because it had been sitting on the lot for nearly a month and I was willing to drive 300 miles for a better deal if necessary.

 

This is all spot on.

 

And I can confirm that Mohawk Honda has a no haggle policy.  Their price is their price.

[LeviF]

8 minutes ago, zevo said:

Depends on what you own. I purchased a new 2019 4 runner pro at the end of 2019. I traded it in last month and received 1800$ more than i paid for it. 

Well, kind of. You got a discount on a new car that was $1800 more than you paid. The dealership I bought my CPO impala from three years ago just offered me $12k on trade but that’s a bit different from cash in hand. 

[zevo]

1 minute ago, LeviF91 said:

Well, kind of. You got a discount on a new car that was $1800 more than you paid. The dealership I bought my CPO impala from three years ago just offered me $12k on trade but that’s a bit different from cash in hand. 

I got 3k off sticker on a vehicle in the wny the dealers would only budge 1k max. I drove out of state for the deal. My 4runner pro is a rare vehicle that is not discounted. I’m just saying it depends on what u r trading in. 

[LeviF]

5 minutes ago, zevo said:

I got 3k off sticker on a vehicle in the wny the dealers would only budge 1k max. I drove out of state for the deal. My 4runner pro is a rare vehicle that is not discounted. I’m just saying it depends on what u r trading in. 

This is true, it depends somewhat on what you’re trading in. Not everyone gets hosed. 

[zevo]

2 minutes ago, LeviF91 said:

This is true, it depends somewhat on what you’re trading in. Not everyone gets hosed. 

But you are 100% correct...a lot of people do get hosed...part of it you also have to factor in is the trade value being deducted from the purchase value for sales tax if the state you register in charges sales tax on vehicles. This keeps the stealerships and auto mfr thriving.

 

[LeviF]

Just now, zevo said:

But you are 100% correct...a lot of people do get hosed...part of it you also have to factor in is the trade value being deducted from the purchase value for sales tax if the state you register in charges sales tax on vehicles. This keeps the stealerships and auto mfr thriving.

 

 

Don't you just love NY lol.  But yeah if you're savvy and know the relative value of the car you're trading in OR it's a rare enough combination that a dealer doesn't mind just giving you a "blow them away" trade in value then you'll be ok.

 

If you aren't a car guy and drive around a base Corolla you're better off googling KBB, selling it to a HS kid for his busboy tips and using that as a down payment.

[Sundancer]

Just got a 2021 Bolt Premier for my wife. 10.5 K off. Could have gotten 3K more with a Costco membership. Final price with taxes 28K. No haggle. 

Edited April 29, 2021 by Sundancer

[zevo]

On 4/29/2021 at 5:55 AM, Sundancer said:

Just got a 2021 Bolt Premier for my wife. 10.5 K off. Could have gotten 3K more with a Costco membership. Final price with taxes 28K. No haggle. 

Why wouldn’t you have just signed up for a costco membership?

[Sundancer]

6 hours ago, zevo said:

Why wouldn’t you have just signed up for a costco membership?

 

Membership needed to be in place 60d in advance of purchase. 

Edited May 2, 2021 by Sundancer

[Gugny]

On 5/2/2021 at 3:07 PM, Sundancer said:

 

Membership needed to be in place 60d in advance of purchase. 

 

I hope you taught your wife a lesson for not thinking about this two months ago.  

[ExiledInIllinois]

On 4/29/2021 at 4:55 AM, Sundancer said:

Just got a 2021 Bolt Premier for my wife. 10.5 K off. Could have gotten 3K more with a Costco membership. Final price with taxes 28K. No haggle. 

$40k for that thing?  It's worth no more than $20k IMO.  You paid $8k too much.

 

I just looked it up!

 

A gas version Chevy Trax or Buick Encore is same except they run on fuel.  They go $21,000 MSRP.  $7,000 will buy you a lot fuel on a vehicle that gets 32mpg Highway!  That will take you a whopping... About ~75,000 miles (ballpark estimate).  That's 7.5 years for most!  Batteries last 7.5 years?

 

Those batteries will be a maintenance nightmare @ 75,000-100,000 miles! By then the gas vehicle will then be saving the environment AND will still have another 100,000 miles to give on it's STANDARD service life... IF not more!

 

To each their own, but the EV premium is too steep!  @ full price $40k, I can't imagine how many years it will take until you start saving money!  $28k does cut that down by a third... BUT in the end the EV is still hurting the enviro more AND worse, your pocketbook!

 

Simply put... EVs have to get closer to where fuel vehicles are.  The EV premium has to disappear!  $7,000 is a lot of years, miles on an already environmentally friendly fuel burning vehicle!

 

IMO... If I haven't laid it out already, it's not helping the environment.  Probably worse footprint on the environment with overall manufacturing footprint and then higher end of service life foot print.

 

Somebody, please crunch through the EV Premium numbers, tell me I am wrong, I wanna feel good about EVs! ...But, I honestly I won't until EV prices jive more with their fuel counterparts.

 

 

Edited May 4, 2021 by ExiledInIllinois

[WhoTom]

19 minutes ago, ExiledInIllinois said:

IMO... If I haven't laid it out already, it's not helping the environment.  Probably worse footprint on the environment with overall manufacturing footprint and then higher end of service life foot print.

 

Somebody, please crunch through the EV Premium numbers, tell me I am wrong, I wanna feel good about EVs! ...But, I honestly I won't until EV prices jive more with their fuel counterparts.

 

https://www.engineering.com/story/is-my-electric-vehicle-really-green

 

 

[ExiledInIllinois]

30 minutes ago, WhoTom said:

 

https://www.engineering.com/story/is-my-electric-vehicle-really-green

 

 

Yeah... But does he drag a vehicle out to a 1/4 of a million miles or more?

[WhoTom]

7 minutes ago, ExiledInIllinois said:

Yeah... But does he drag a vehicle out to a 1/4 of a million miles or more?

 

First, the article is from 2019 and the research I cited in there is a couple of years older than that. Batteries have improved in performance and decreased in price since then, and electricity sources have continued to become more green, so everything about the carbon footprint and TCO applies even more today than it did when I wrote it.

 

To your question, an EV has very few moving parts compared to an ICE. so other than replacing the battery after 10-12 years, there's no reason to think it wouldn't go 250k miles or more.

 

 

[Ridgewaycynic2013]

On 5/2/2021 at 3:07 PM, Sundancer said:

 

Membership needed to be in place 60d in advance of purchase. 

Sixty days of missed dill pickles...😕 (In 5 gallon pails 😁)

[ExiledInIllinois]

53 minutes ago, WhoTom said:

 

First, the article is from 2019 and the research I cited in there is a couple of years older than that. Batteries have improved in performance and decreased in price since then, and electricity sources have continued to become more green, so everything about the carbon footprint and TCO applies even more today than it did when I wrote it.

 

To your question, an EV has very few moving parts compared to an ICE. so other than replacing the battery after 10-12 years, there's no reason to think it wouldn't go 250k miles or more.

 

 

We will see.  Yet, I can tear into an engine and fix it, not so much fixing a battery... I hope green vehicles become DYI.  Once they start flooding the market and getting miles put on... The used car 100,000 market will the beater vehicles laying all around be more "toxic?"  What's the long term plan for the working-class, DYI, poorer communities?  Will they still have the freedom? Or... Tied to a power grid?  The rich engineer in your article didn't discuss that... When we fully go this new tech.  Is a rusted automobile with oil in it worse than a rusted automobile laying with a lithium battery in it?

 

Going across country... Will you have to swipe your card for juice?

 

Get rid of the cost premium for basically a rebadged, different power-plant ICE vehicle and I am on board.  $7,000 is over almost a 100,000 miles on a vehicle.  That's  10 years.  An average car loan is 5 years... Get green vehicels to start saving you money under 5 years and I am on board.

 

I am still skeptical because of real-world parameters that you'll end up shelling out more, not really help the environment and lose your lack of DYI freedom.  It's going to hit the poorer communities harder, IMO.

Edited May 4, 2021 by ExiledInIllinois

[WhoTom]

1 hour ago, ExiledInIllinois said:

The used car 100,000 market will the beater vehicles laying all around be more "toxic?"  

 

Is a rusted automobile with oil in it worse than a rusted automobile laying with a lithium battery in it?

 

1. I wouldn't ditch a decent ICE for an EV - you're right that the carbon footprint of building an EV is worse than continuing to drive an ICE that's already on the road. (Case in point, I have a Corolla with just over 100k on it and I still drive it.) The point is that if you're in the market for a new vehicle anyway, the EV is almost always the better ecological choice, and, over the long haul, the better economic choice too.

 

2. My article discusses the end-of-life options for EV batteries. They don't just lay around rusting away. (And there are more battery recycling operations today than when the article was published.)

 

[ExiledInIllinois]

16 minutes ago, WhoTom said:

 

1. I wouldn't ditch a decent ICE for an EV - you're right that the carbon footprint of building an EV is worse than continuing to drive an ICE that's already on the road. (Case in point, I have a Corolla with just over 100k on it and I still drive it.) The point is that if you're in the market for a new vehicle anyway, the EV is almost always the better ecological choice, and, over the long haul, the better economic choice too.

 

2. My article discusses the end-of-life options for EV batteries. They don't just lay around rusting away. (And there are more battery recycling operations today than when the article was published.)

 

1.  We shall see!

2. LoL... Oh yes they will lay around.  In the poorer communities. BUT we shall see. Is it free to take a battery in?  I know they will give you a discount on a new one with normal lead acid batteries. 

 

Call me a skeptic!  You're less off the grid, hook with an ICE. This will speed up more environmental racism, create more sacrifice zones...

 

[WhoTom]

1 hour ago, ExiledInIllinois said:

Oh yes they will lay around.  In the poorer communities. BUT we shall see. Is it free to take a battery in?  I know they will give you a discount on a new one with normal lead acid batteries. 

 

It's in the industry's best interests to encourage re-use and recycling of used EV batteries so, yes, I would expect them to offer an incentive to return them like they do for lead-acid batteries. When we say an EV battery has reached the end of its useful life, that means it only holds about 80% of its original capacity. There's still plenty of life left in the battery, but the decreased capacity will shorten an EV's range. Used EV batteries can be resold for stationary energy storage purposes (e.g. grid-level storage, home energy storage systems) where capacity-to-weight isn't as much of an issue. And when those repurposed batteries reach the end of their lives, they can be recycled, as it's cheaper to recover those raw materials than to mine for new stuff. The industry is not only planning for that, it's counting on it.

 

As far as the poorer communities, like any new technology, the affluent will be the first to adopt, then the middle class, and then the poor. My parents got married in 1945 and it took them several years to scrape up a few hundred bucks to buy a used car so Dad didn't have to hitchhike to work and Mom didn't have to ride the bus to the grocery store. It's not like the advent of EVs is going to eliminate ICEs tomorrow. People who can't afford EVs (like me) will wait until the price makes sense. Having watched and written about this industry for several years, I'm comfortable saying that it'll happen by the end of this decade. The last vehicle I purchased was in 2016; I expect that to be the last ICE I ever buy, for ecological and economic reasons.

 

 

[ExiledInIllinois]

9 minutes ago, WhoTom said:

 

It's in the industry's best interests to encourage re-use and recycling of used EV batteries so, yes, I would expect them to offer an incentive to return them like they do for lead-acid batteries. When we say an EV battery has reached the end of its useful life, that means it only holds about 80% of its original capacity. There's still plenty of life left in the battery, but the decreased capacity will shorten an EV's range. Used EV batteries can be resold for stationary energy storage purposes (e.g. grid-level storage, home energy storage systems) where capacity-to-weight isn't as much of an issue. And when those repurposed batteries reach the end of their lives, they can be recycled, as it's cheaper to recover those raw materials than to mine for new stuff. The industry is not only planning for that, it's counting on it.

 

As far as the poorer communities, like any new technology, the affluent will be the first to adopt, then the middle class, and then the poor. My parents got married in 1945 and it took them several years to scrape up a few hundred bucks to buy a used car so Dad didn't have to hitchhike to work and Mom didn't have to ride the bus to the grocery store. It's not like the advent of EVs is going to eliminate ICEs tomorrow. People who can't afford EVs (like me) will wait until the price makes sense. Having watched and written about this industry for several years, I'm comfortable saying that it'll happen by the end of this decade. The last vehicle I purchased was in 2016; I expect that to be the last ICE I ever buy, for ecological and economic reasons.

 

 

Fair enough.  IMO, things will cost us more. In long run we'll pay more...

 

Get that break even point under 5 years, even better 3 and we're in business.

 

Look how they have us hooked on cellphones.  Barely end up paying it off if lucky and thing goes bad.  They will work obsolescence into cars.

 

I will believe it when I see it.  We are land of unintended consequences!