I recently bought an 8 year old Honda accord off a main dealer and couldn't get him to budge on price so paid full whack. It came with 12 month warranty and they did around £500 of work on it I asked for. It also came with full dealer service history and tank of diesel. On the drive home I found a few minor snags and a slipping clutch. The dealer fixed the snags and put a new clutch in no questions asked and without using the warranty.
So in summary even though I paid top whack It was money well spent. I saw an identical model in a private dealer for £500 more and he wouldn't move on price either but I bet he wouldn't have put a new clutch in. So even if they can't do much on price it may still be worth it.
@Onza Caddy - rent one (I did that) or try and get an extended test drive. As I've posted before I'm a big fan of older Rav4's where you can remove the rear seats making it van like, Toyota reliability, 4x4 and drives much better than a van imho. Should never have sold ours and I'm thinking of another
Disagree Jamba - I use those exact roads all the time and cruise is always on.
Middle lane set to 55 ? 😉
The the only way I've managed to get a discount with main dealers is to view the car, have a drive, sit down to seal the deal and when the haggling is limited to a set of floor mats/tank of fuel, get cold feet and say we are going off to think about it. This was after getting a bit stubborn when they wanted to charge us full RRP for a missing parcel shelf.
We said we'd ring before they closed 30 minutes later if we wanted to put a deposit down, but sod that, we got in the old car and drove off. Deliberately didn't ring them before closing time, 10 minutes later the salesman was ringing us and suddenly the price had some movement in it, and they'd found a parcel shelf (i.e when we picked the car up, we waited whilst they nicked a shelf out of another car on the forecourt)
Still had to remind them about the fuel when we picked it up.
I bought a £12K Merc ML320 from Main dealer back in October. They wouldn't move on the price but they did advise me of that over the phone before I travelled to see it. They did however, say it would be mint upon collection. They weren't kidding.
Any chips and marks were repaired. Flawlessly. All four wheels refurbished. New tyres on the front plus another £1500s worth of bits on the service invoice before it was released. And a year's Mercedes warranty.
Even though there were cars with £90k in the showroom, I was treated like Royalty throughout. I had a five hour drive home after picking the car up and I had phone all from them to see if I'd made it home safely.
I'll be going back to replace our other car there later this year.
