“Hi Randy,

Just wanted to thank you again for detailing your car purchase method to the geezers.

Worked with my daughter to compose a letter, went out last Tuesday, had four offers late Tuesday, a fifth on Wednesday, she had to work Thursday, but she drove her new car home yesterday.

All went very well, it was her first new car buying experience and she really learned a lot.

So again thanks.

Cheers,”

Hi, Randy!

I wanted to thank you for posting your process for buying a new car and answering my many questions over the last few weeks.

I used your process to buy a new Subaru Impreza hatchback with moon roof and cruise control assist. I got the car for $200 under dealer invoice from the comfort of my den. :-)

I’d like to share my experience and give a suggestion on a couple of additions to your website post, “So you wanna buy a new car…”.

Here’s a recap of my experience. I test drove 4 different cars starting in early December and finally decided on the Impreza. There are 9 Subaru dealers within an hour of my home in Pittsburgh. I edited your form letter with the Edmunds information on invoice costs for the car I wanted, and inserted my letter into the Comment box in each dealer’s “Contact Us” form and sent them out on Monday night, Dec. 28th.

Even though I said “no phone calls” in the letter and checked the “prefer contact via email” box on each of their forms, I got 5 voice mail messages within one hour of sending out the letter. (As you’ve mentioned in your post, some of the sales people have trouble with reading. :-) And I knew enough not to answer the phone.)

8 of the 9 dealers eventually contacted me via email. Some gave me quotes for Imprezas they had in inventory, even though they did not meet my requirements (missing the moon roof and cruise control assist). One wanted me to “come in to the dealership so we could talk”. (Ummmm, no. I told him I preferred to do everything via email.) One dealer said that there was not a car within 200 miles of Pittsburgh that met my requirements. But three dealers found a car and gave me quotes. The quotes were $1700 over invoice, $0 over invoice, and $200 under invoice.

The $200 under invoice quote was from a dealer 45 minutes away. Once I went back and forth via email with the 8 dealers who responded throughout Tuesday, and knew I wasn’t going to get anything better for the car that I wanted, I accepted the offer of $200 under invoice and told the salesman the hours I’d be available to sign the papers on Wednesday, Dec. 30th. (I had a time constraint because we were going to celebrate my Dad’s 86th birthday later on that afternoon.) At that point, we started talking via phone. The internet salesman said the car was being transferred to the dealership by 11:00 a.m. and we should arrive by 11:30.

As expected, once I arrived I had to listen to sales pitches for undercoating (I didn’t know they still did that…lol), extended warranty plan, and service plans. I declined them all.

The car still hadn’t arrived by noon. I asked where it was coming from. I found out it was coming from the dealer closest to my home, the one that quoted $1700 over invoice! I had a private laugh with my husband on that. I’m really glad I just hadn’t gone to that dealership and tried to negotiate down from that high price!

The salesman suggested we go out to lunch while waiting for the car to arrive, and his manager said they would pick up the tab since we had to wait for the car. So we got a free lunch. We finally signed all the papers and left with the car around 2:30 p.m.

All in all, a wonderful, painless experience! We will definitely use this approach for all our new car purchases going forward, and I plan to tell all my brothers about it.

Just two suggestions for additions to your “So you wanna buy a car” post on your website….perhaps you could add them at the end, as an addendum.

1. How to find the dealer invoice prices on Edmunds.com. The message you sent to pngeezers a couple weeks ago was very timely for me. I didn’t realize you had to click on the “More” button to get access to the True Market Value pricing tool and that’s where the dealer invoice info is on the car and all the options.

2. That the way to send an email to the dealerships is to use their “Contact Us” forms, and to “cut & paste” the letter into the comment box. I had searched around trying to find the email address for a couple dealers and couldn’t find them. You told me in a private message just to use their Contact Us form.

One thing I’d do next time is to NOT give them my phone number. It was not a required field in the Contact Us form, but I just automatically added it (and then got 5 calls that evening!).

Thanks, again, for publicizing the process and for answering all of my questions. I’m really glad to be a part of the pngeezer community, with all of the experience and wisdom of P&G retirees to learn from.

Hope you have a wonderful new year!