From: andrey@cs.arizona.edu (Andrey K. Yeatts)
Newsgroups: rec.autos
Subject: Re: Accuracy of Those Car Price Books
Date: 31 Dec 92 17:59:54 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona, CS Dept, Tucson

I've been looking at the Toyota Corolla, the Geo Prizm, the Saturn SL2
and a bunch of others. I bought the Pace Auto Price Almanac (about $6),
which comes out every two months or so and ordered the Consumer Reports
listings, which are run from $11 to $5 per car, depending on quantity.
CU doesn't always have the prices on every car (I couldn't get the '93
Subarus, for example) and the Pace book that I purchased at the beginning
of the December had '92 prices for Subaru and Geo. One nice thing about the CU
list was that they enclosed a list of with factory-to-purchaser and
factory-to-dealer rebates through the end of January or February. The
prices on corresponding entries between the Pace and the CU lists were
identical.

As far as price accuracy goes, the only confirmation I've had of real
dealer invoice prices was at the Geo dealer. I presented a salesman with the
CU list with my desired options checked off, which came to $12,707, dealer
invoice. He went back to total his cost and came back with $12,706 + change. The
discrepancies (I looked over his list) that I saw were from CU's rounding up
to whole dollar amounts.

This doesn't mean, of course, that they might not be paying less for the car,
but they didn't challenge any of my figures, and remarked about how close
the numbers were. I assume they aren't paying any more that the cost I figured.

Visting two auto brokers, I found that they gets their prices from a large
blue book (Moody's?) and that they agreed with my Pace/CU prices as well.
They also quoted advertising charges to me, passed on from the dealer.

The only challenge I've ever received from a dealer was at a Toyota dealership,
where the saleslady pointed at my list and said "Well, you know, those prices
are frequently wrong. See, here you have air conditioning listed at $688
[pointing to my figure], but the price is $860 [pointing to the sticker on
the window]." Duh. I guess they just have to try; maybe they'll get lucky and
the mark will become confused and toss out his homework. By the way, after
presenting them with these list (with invoice figures) and asking for their
profit and closing costs, I was treated to 45 minutes with a "closer" who
is supposedly skilled at getting you to say uncle and sign. The whole sordid
thing took about 2 hours before they came up with a $640 profit figure, which
they made a big deal about concealing and said they'd "try" to get the manager
to go for. Ick. The GM/Geo salesman didn't flinch, bullshit, or whine about
anything, came in with a price about $600 less (which includes about $250
in lesser cost for the Prizm vs. Corolla and $100 less in advertising costs)
and the trip took only about 45 minutes.

Part of the difference is the salesman, of course, but the dealership sets
the tone, and there was a clear and unsavory policy at the Toyota place.
The other Toyota dealer I've been to was almost as aggressive, but not
quite as "structured" as the first.

Sorry for the ramble. In a nutshell, the prices are as accurate as you're
going to find and will not be any less than dealer cost, though what sort of
incentives there are between dealer and factory are very hard to find. They
can be pretty complex and can vary by number of cars sold at the dealer, by
region, by overall sales volume, phase of the moon, ... Consumer's Reports
gives ballpark incentive figures by model (e.g., "Nissan Sentra $450-$750,
depending on region"), so you're only partially enlightened. However, getting
these figures out of salesmen is sometimes impossible, since they themselves
may not know it.

In general, because of the overall agreement of facts that I've seen,
I don't think there're any big secrets (maybe some small ones) in the 
auto biz, and consequently I think that bargaining up from these invoice
figures rather than down from some absurd window sticker price will yield
a better price.


-- 
Andrey Yeatts					Dept. of Computer Science
andrey@cs.arizona.edu				Univ. of Arizona
{uunet,allegra,cmcl2,noao}!arizona!andrey	Tucson, AZ 85721
						(602) 621-4108