A little over a year ago, I went shopping with my wife for a car. Why would I volunteer to enter hell and negotiate with the devil? Because I love her and because she batted her pretty eyes at me and implied that it was my job as a real man to slay the car salesman monster. I already commented above on our aborted attempt to test drive a hybrid Ford Fusion. That dealer was the dealer from whom I had purchased my Ford Explorer five years earlier.
The reason we went first to that dealership was that I really like the service department there. My Explorer has never been repaired anywhere else. I schedule a service appointment for the next morning, drop off my Explorer just after 7 A.M., and pick up a loaner car. I am then off to the office without losing more than ten minutes from my schedule. When the service is done, I drop off the loaner, pick up the Explorer, and am back on schedule again. I know I pay a little more for routine service there, but saving the time in my schedule is worth much more. In addition, they have passed up several good opportunities to rip me off on repairs. What needs fixed gets fixed, and what can wait for another five thousand miles waits. To coin a phrase, my priorities don’t get hijacked, because my vehicle needs service. They don’t treat me like a fool.
However, whatever they are doing right on the service side doesn’t appear to carry over to the sales side. They might as well have two separate companies. The service side respects customers, but the sale side treats us like fools. Our particular whack job sales guy had been on the job for six months. From my extensive research (I had spent half an hour on the internet researching the Ford Fusion), I knew more about both the standard Fusion and the hybrid Fusion than he did. After half an hour of standing around, he was able to determine that the last hybrid Fusion was sold fifteen minutes earlier. Someone bought it without even a test drive. After another fifteen minutes, he determined that no other dealers in the area had any. I don’t doubt him in that regard. As I noted earlier, Ford didn’t build many and couldn’t react quickly to soaring demand. I convinced Laura to drive a standard six cylinder Fusion. It was a nice car. But it was priced like a Honda Accord, and isn’t a Honda Accord in any way except price. We weren’t going to wait around for the standard, “Let me check with my sales manager about pricing.”
We drove around the corner to a Nissan dealer. There Laura drove a Nissan Altima. This sales weenie had been around for about two months. Again my extensive internet research on the Altima (ten minutes) armed me with superior knowledge. The Altima has a lot going for it including a continuously variable automatic transmission that I really like. Despite the sales weenie’s inexperience, I thought the Altima was a real possibility to replace Laura’s Accord. The next step was to find a little about the dealer service department. We found that they didn’t have loaner cars. That was a deal breaker since the dealership was pretty far from our house and not on the way to Laura’s office. We decided to look at a Nissan dealer closer to home. I told the sale weenie I would keep in touch. Yes, I lied. But you know how I feel about car dealers. They need to provide more value to the world in terms of my personal amusement.
Our next stop was the Honda dealer where Laura had purchased her previous two Accords. They aren’t a larger dealership, but are owned by a large national chain of dealerships. Laura also liked their service department. They don’t have loaner cars for service either, but they are close to our house. So service is a minor inconvenience for her. Our sales person at this dealer had eight years experience. We were amazed. In this entire miserable experience, he was the only sales person we met with more than one year’s experience. That fact alone tells you volumes about the auto industry and why it is continuously in trouble. Of course, my internet research (ten minutes) didn’t give me a knowledge advantage on this guy. Laura and I test drove the new Accord. We both really liked it, and we agreed the Accord was what she wanted.
The only hurdle left was the price negotiation. Of course, calling auto price negotiation a hurdle is like calling the Andes mountain range an ant hill. Fifteen years ago, you could price shop dealers and compare price quotes almost entirely on the internet. I bought my Toyota Rav 4 this way. I didn’t even visit a dealership until I had the price negotiated and was ready to take delivery. Of all the ways internet buying has evolved in fifteen years, purchasing a car on the internet has gotten more difficult. Dealers realized that the internet leveled the knowledge playing field for customers. So they had to find a way to effectively kill auto shopping on the internet. Today, you cannot get a real price for a vehicle on the internet. You have to correspond first with the dealer’s douche bag in charge of internet sales. He / she will ask you in an e-mail message to come in and talk in person if you want to get the real price. The price you get by e-mail just happens to correspond pretty much exactly with the price you get by e-mail from any other area dealer. I will have more on this later. The auto industry has killed internet shopping for cars by either taking over or sponsoring the major web sites devoted to auto sales. Since the sites depend on revenue from dealers for survival, you can’t get real prices on the internet anymore.
I have a battle tested strategy for auto price negotiation that I have modified a little for the e-mail age. (If you work in the auto industry, immediately cease reading this chapter). The sales vermin in an auto dealership know that they get basically one chance to sell you a car. That is why they require you to visit. They know two facts. First, if you don’t visit the dealership personally, you are unlikely to buy from them. That is why you can no longer get pricing information on the internet. Second, if you visit the dealership and leave, you are not likely to buy from them. Most visitors, who don’t buy on the first visit, never return. My strategy is to never buy on the first visit. In cold or cool weather, I get the sales dude’s attention really quickly when I put on my coat. That tells them it is time to get to the real price. Then we talk for awhile with my coat on before I leave. Then I tell the sales guy, if I decide to buy his model car, I will buy it from him personally. I give him my contact information. Then I wait for a few days. Next, I send him an e-mail message thanking him for his time and knowledge. That is it. The next step is that he responds with the real final price offer.
I had not purchased a car in five years when Laura and I went shopping for her car. The sales guy at the Honda dealer had an information advantage about which I was unaware. When I carried out my purchasing strategy with him, I had also e-mailed a number of other local Honda dealers to get comparative pricing. I thought I was smart and had evolved my strategy. One dealer gave me a significantly lower price on the exact same Accord down to the interior and paint colors. The scumbags in the auto industry call the combination of body style, color, and interior the “trim”. When I gave Laura’s dealer the lower price from his competitor in a telephone conversation, he responded that the other dealer “couldn’t” sell that trim for that price. I found his choice of term “couldn’t” to be strange.
In the meantime, Laura and I visited a nearby Nissan dealer to see if she should reconsider the Nissan Altima. Our sales moron was a new arrival from Los Angeles. He wasn’t just new to the Northern Virginia area. He was new to auto sales. What a shocker. He wore a nice dark blue suit on a ninety degree, warm, humid Northern Virginia day. He invited us for a test drive. We didn’t tell him we had already driven an Altima, because I didn’t want him to know I already had a price from the first Nissan dealer we had visited. Laura was the first to drive the car. I sat in the passenger’s seat and our sales moron sat in the driver’s side rear seat. We asked him what route we should take. I know that dealerships typically have standard routes for test drives that keep you away from bad traffic areas. Driving an unfamiliar car in an unfamiliar area isn’t a great idea. He didn’t know the route outside the left turn out of the dealership. Fortunately, we have both been in the area for more than twenty years and know all the local roads. We made our own route.
After driving for a couple of miles, Laura and I switched seats. I became the driver. After a couple more miles, I turned right onto the southbound lanes of Route 28 in Loudoun County. We were headed back to the dealership, which was about three miles away. We were driving on a section of Route 28 that had three lanes going in each direction. Both sides of the road were under construction. For our southbound lanes, there was no shoulder. Concrete jersey walls bordered the right lane. I was driving about sixty miles per hour. Yes, Your Honor, I was speeding a little. I was checking the stability of the Altima at highway speeds. It was, in fact, very stable. I was really enjoying the feeling of the continuously variable automatic transmission. Then the engine began to sputter, and the car began to slow. In just a few seconds, we went from sixty miles per hour to twenty. Then the car sputtered one last time and the engine stopped completely. I drifted over into the right lane. I tried a couple of times to restart the car before realizing we were just plain out of gas. We were sitting out in the open on a heavily trafficked section of a highway with no way to even push the car out of the lane on the shoulder. Still the sales moron said nothing.
Laura asked him if he could call the dealership to get someone to pick us up. He told her he didn’t have a cell phone. Laura gave him hers. At least he knew the dealership phone number. As he was talking to his sales manager, I could tell he had no idea where we were. Although we were three miles drive from the dealership, we were only about half a mile from the dealership as the crow flies. In fact several crows flew over us in the direction of the car lot. Dealerships are target rich environments for birds. We could actually see the dealership from our location. I gave our sales moron directions to give to his sales manager. After the phone call ended, he told us a van was on the way to retrieve us.
I said, “We need to get our asses out of this car.” I knew if a thousand cars drove past us, one would be sure to hit us. Laura was barely able to open the passenger’s side front door against the concrete barrier. She crawled out of the small door opening and then over the barrier. I followed. The sale douche was still sitting in the back seat and wasn’t moving.
After I was over the barrier, I leaned back into the car and said, “You’re going to get killed just sitting there.” Maybe he had been in a deep state of disbelief. Maybe, he was just that damn stupid. This time he got out. The three of us were now standing on the dusty road shoulder on the safe side of the barrier directly under a hot afternoon sun. I wasn’t very happy, but I thought, “How long can it take for the van to go three miles and pick us up?”
Apparently, it can take a long time. Using Einstein’s equations defining the space time continuum, I have since calculated that it can take a van, driven by an idiot, going in the absolutely wrong direction an infinite amount of time to go three miles in the correct direction. After about fifteen excruciatingly hot minutes, our sales moron asked for Laura’s phone and called his sales manager again. He gave us the news that they had tracked down the van miles away from our location going in the wrong direction.
Shortly after the phone call, an officer from the Loudoun County Sheriff’s department pulled his cruiser in behind our stopped Altima. We told him our sad story and the sales weenie told him a van was on the way for us. The officer told him that we now had a race. The officer had called for a tow truck to be dispatched. If the tow truck got there before the dealer van, the car would be towed back to the dealer’s lot with the dealer responsible for the charge, of course. If the van got there first and had gas to get the car started, we could drive away. Las Vegas bookmakers had the odds ten to one against the van getting there first and seven to one against the van having gas to get the car started.
The tow truck won by about ten seconds. The sales moron asked the officer to send the tow truck away since the van had arrived before the car was raised up for towing. The officer told him that once the tow truck was there, it was a done deal. The car was getting towed and the dealer was footing the bill. The tow truck drove off with the Altima, and we got a ride back to the dealership in the back of a hot van.
When the van arrived back at the lot, we were met by the sales manager and directed inside the showroom to a couple of plastic pigeon chairs. I call them pigeon chairs, because that’s what car buyers are to car dealers. The sales manager brought us two Diet Cokes. We had been uncomfortably hot in shorts and polo shirts, but our sales idiot had sweated all the way through his nice blue suit. He was dripping wet. He looked like he really needed a drink. Laura asked the sales manager if he would bring a Coke for the sales weenie.
He shot a steely glare at the sales moron and said, “No. I am really sorry {insert sales idiot’s name here} took you out in a car without enough gas. He really should have checked before he took you out.” Every car we test drove at every dealership had the low gas indicator light on. How was our sales moron supposed to know there wasn’t enough? The sales manager acted as if it was the sales weenie’s job to check the gas on every car that gets test driven. Until the manager’s comment, we weren’t that upset. We got up to leave. The sales manager then said, “I understand you didn’t have a very good experience, because your sales person let you run out of gas. I hope you won’t hold that against us.” I thought our sales weenie was a fool. The sales manager was the Dalai Lama of fools.
For those of you at least vaguely interested in how a dealership can keep sufficient gas for test drives, I offer the following analysis. Of course, keeping all the tanks full on all the cars on a dealer’s lot makes no economic sense. Filling all the tanks just ties up a lot of cash at $2.75 a gallon. There is a procedure a smart dealer, assuming there are any, can use to make certain every car being test driven has sufficient gas but not too much. Let’s assume the average test drive uses a gallon of gas. I know most test drives last for less than ten miles. That shouldn’t use a gallon of gas. However, pretty much every time you start your car, you are going to use a gallon of gas between warm up, idling, and driving. Work with me here. After every test drive, the sales vermin should put a small tag on the windshield indicating that the car has just been out on a test drive. One of the lot attendants can then fill the car with a gallon of gas. That ensures that each car that has been driven has at least a gallon of gas for the next pigeon. Doesn’t that seem simple?
The experience with the Nissan dealer still left Laura one new car short of our goal. In my next post, I'll write about the price fixing we encountered making the final purchase.
