Now there seems to be no websites that show dealer invoice costs. The closest thing might be Consumer Reports but to even see their info you have to pay them and they don't really say exactly where their pricing comes from.
So did something change? Is there no longer any fixed "dealer invoice" costs between manufacturers and dealers? Now edmunds just has that stupid "best price" or whatever, which to me just means the price the average sucker paid.
You can still find invoice pricing on Edmumds but it's rather a pain to get to it."Build" the vehicle then click on the pricing tab and you'll get the invoice price.
$200 over invoice is no great deal anymore because of factory to dealer incentives. While you still get the factory to buyer incentives no matter what, the factory to dealer incentives, not to mention the holdback, bring the dealer cost way below invoice price for many makes. The factory to dealer incentives are hard to track down.
I recall when I was researching Toyotas a while back and there were three separate factory to dealer payments besides any incentives. They paid the dealer 2% holdback, 2% for advertising, and 1% for "Wholesale Financial Reserve," which I think was to help them finance their inventory. The payments were based on base invoice price. But many dealers tried to add an advertising fee that their region assessed them even though they were being reimbursed for this by Toyota. They really did pay this fee to their regional distributor ($500 at the time), but they were already getting paid back most or all of this (or even more) by Toyota.
Those "TMV" prices are bogus. No one should be paying that much.
The best non-negotiation pricing that I've found is from USAA, if you're a member. They use Truecar's system but their pricing is less than the prices Truecar quotes. The last car we bought the USAA price was several hundred dollars below Costco or Truecar. But alas, the only dealer that dealt with USAA was sold out of what we wanted, and a much larger factory incentive ($3000) was about to expire, so we paid the Costco price at another dealer. They were selling every single car of this model very quickly so we reluctantly paid an extra $300 (the Costco agreed price).
Thanks for the info. I don't mind paying a fair price but I like to know if what they are offering is fair. Without some idea of true dealer cost it's hard to judge. I figure that at the very least, if they TMV is mostly "what people are paying" then if you are willing to walk away if needed you should be able to get it for less then the TMV. The sales managers at these dealerships weren't born yesterday....
KBB.com used to have that information. I don't know if they still do.
"Dealer Invoice" was always a fantasy anyway. There were lots of kickbacks and incentives that made the invoice a lot more than what the dealer actually paid (perhaps for some dealers but not all). There were plenty of high volume dealers who would be happy to sell a car for "$200 over invoice" because they were making plenty of other money off of it. Financing kickbacks and dealer installed options have always been a big profit center.. These days that may not be true. I haven't bought a new car for a while and I don't know anyone in the business. We used to know a couple of guys who worked at dealerships..
Exactly. Dealers want people to think that the "Dealer Invoice" is how much a vehicle costs them to buy from the manufacturer.
In fact "Dealer Invoice" is a good price to bargain down from once you know all the extra spiffs the dealer is receiving from the manufacturer.
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