Yeh, I know about depreciation etc but the car we may want after test drives is a new model and brand new online ones are apparently cheaper than (barely) used – admittedly without any haggling but then there are very few used ones about for me to work with

Is drivethedeal and the like a nightmare ?
or, anyone done this and lived ?

All I will say is be careful.

My brother-in-law bought a brand new Nissan Qasqai through an interwebs dealership.

6 months later visited by bailiffs who re-posessed the car – turned out the website was some criminal selling vehicles illegally.

He hadn’t used a credit card, so lost the car & the money.

I’ve been spending the last few weeks getting prices on new vans and I found that on some manufacturers, their dealers could match the online brokers prices and in some cases beat them.

I always thought that the main dealers would be a lot dearer and no doubt in some cases they are; but it’s definately worth trying them.

I used drive the deal to buy our S-Max. Couldn’t have been easier. They are just a broker- they encourage dealers to give them their best price for any given model, then put the business their way. Presumably DTD take some commission from the dealer, but as a buyer, after the initial phone call to DTD you just speak to the dealership. Safe as houses. (well safe as buying a new car from a main dealer anyway)
I was well chuffed with the price I paid, £7000+ off list and £2000 less than the what car target price.
Only slight down side would be if you have a PX to get rid of, obviously they won’t be interested, but I just auctioned our old zafira.
Like you we looked around secondhand first, a similar spec 18 month old model was £2k more in our local ford dealers- no brainer.

I very nearly used DTD last year. Looked fine to me as above, they just put you in touch with a dealer at a pre-negotiated “best price”, but my local dealer got close enough to the price so I went with that instead.

Would have had used them if not though.

Probably a good thing to check as leverage to use with your local main dealer. Our local honda dealer knocked about 4 grand of the price of my dads new car to match an online deal that he found, after initially saying that the best discount he could do was 5%

Probably a good thing to check as leverage to use with your local main dealer.

That’s what I’m hoping for, yeah – presumably warranty work etc would have to go back via the original dealer, in Inverness or wherever ?

You new car warranty can be dealt with at any of the manufacturers dealers, so no worries about having to travel to the supplying dealer.

As amplebrew said, the dealer you buy it from is irrelevant to future servicing/warranty requirements. The local dealer will be happy to fleece you annually look after you!

I’m expecting free servicing 😯 for at least a few yrs, followed by non-dealership stuff so hopefully not too much squealing

(interesting about the warranty though)

Nothing in this life is free my friend