Dec. 29th, 2004

chhotii: (Default)
So Mom has narrowed down what car she wants. A new Honda Accord EX, with automatic transmission and cloth interior.

So now we just have to play the price game...

car bought

Dec. 29th, 2004 05:57 pm
chhotii: (Default)
Well, we did it.

Things of note:

* Useful to look up the car on Kelley Blue Book and see what they say the price range for the car should be. This made me much more comfortable that the prices we were being quoted were actually reasonable and to be expected.

* Interestingly, though, some of the dealers actually quoted prices to us that were even lower than the bottom end of the KBB range. I wonder if this is because the KBB prices are inflated, or because of year-end and month-end dealer desperation, or some combination. I decided that it's probably at least somewhat timing-based desperation which KBB just hadn't caught up with, so better to buy the car this week than wait and find out if prices go back up next week.

* Really really really useful to print out a list of nearby dealers from Honda's website and have Mom call a bunch of them. A few of them were willing to give a quote over the phone-- some immediately, and some called back with a quote pretty quickly. My favorite dealer, the one in Tewkesbury, gave a really good quote, so we started driving up 38. Then while we were on our way, another dealer, the one in Newtonville, called back on the cell phone and made a slightly better offer, and he had Mom's favorite color in stock too. I didn't turn right around and started driving to Newtonville, figuring that before we put in all that driving we should find out what the Tewkesbury dealer had to say when we told him about the Newtonville quote. Sure enough... the one in Tewkesbury said, I can't lower this price I've offered you any more but if you drive to Newtonville, you will find out that there is a $515 destination charge on top of the price there, whereas I'm not charging you any destination charge. Sure enough, Mom called Newtonville and asked about fees etc., and there was a $515 destination charge. Who knows if we would have had to pay that in Tewkesbury if we hadn't waltzed in with a rival offer.

* The on-line quote thingies seem utterly useless. All they do, it seems, is alert some dealer that you are in the market, and sends them your contact info. I got a call back from the dealer in Boston saying well, we don't get enough information from the website to make a quote, could you give us a call, blah blah blah. In other words, we were in the exact same point in the process as if we had looked up the dealer in the phone book and called up and said "Hi! We want to buy an Accord!" So what use it the web form?

Tomorrow: a blast of new-car smell. Yummy!

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