I'm interested in buying a new S2000 and was considering entering all the information to get those Internet quotes through a site like edmunds.com. Anyone have any good experiences with these? Am I actually going to get a competitive offer? Or am I just going to get a bunch of phone calls telling me that they "300 S2000s on the lot just come on down and we'll make a deal." If anyone has any suggestions for sites other than edmunds, let me know.

Thanks!

 

I happen to know a little bit about this - it is my business

Edmunds is going to forward your request to the most local dealer to you that buys their lead service. The best way to go is through the dealer's own website.

Each dealer handles things differently - some will give you the "Hello____, your car is in stock - when do you want to come in and see it." Others will shoot you a price quote right off the bat. You just have to give them a try. The better dealers do not advertise their Internet Department as a better place to get a deal, but a better place to have less hassle when you come into the store - most of these dealerships will set you up with a Sales Manager or their best Salesperson - not for profit reasons - but for customer service.

Edmunds is a fantastic site to do research: mainly to get a rough estimate of what your trade is worth, to see the invoice, and to get an idea of what others are paying for the same car around the nation (not your local area).

 

One can never have enough car buying info.

http://www.carbuyingtips.com/

 

Thanks Poindexter,

I actually used the quote request on Honda's website and wasn't required to give out my phone number, just email. Received a below invoice quote from one of the dealers in a few hours.

 

What I do is get a few quotes from different dealers through email and tell them so and so is offering you this price, can they beat it?

 

I contacted the internet dept of the dealer directly and made an appt. Not too much hassle from the sales guy but I did run into some problems with the closing guy as there were several numbers that were mysteriously replaced, which I had them changed right away. Overall, it was still a better experience than your typical sales situation. I was in and out of there a lot faster than usual.

 

When I decided to buy mine, i did the internet deal both with a local dealer and with edmunds. I had a response from the Edmunds people in one day, from the local guy in 2 days. the Edmunds were about 250 miles away, local about 2 miles.

prices were competetive, about 31000, 31600 as i recall.

Then,

I took these prices to the local dealer and haggled down to 30600. Took that price to another local dealer (45 miles) and got him to throw in the tags and taxes on a lease deal.

long story short. use the internet prices as starters for the negotiations.

Willinathen

 

I got a whole bunch of quotes from all of the surrounding honda dealers.

I think they were from edmunds.

I found the best quote. $30633 went to the dealer that had the GWP and said, "this dealer quoted me this, but I want your buisness". The fleet manager said, sure thing, and that was that....

 

when I got mine, I was trading a truck in. They tried to bone me on the trade in (as usual), so I gave them a hard time and finally got an additional $2k on it. I figured they would then try to get me on the price to make up for it - except I'd already gotten a quote from their internet dept a week earlier, so I just slapped down my quote (31,000). Dude wasn't very happy with me at that point, much less so 5 minutes later when I told the finance mgr that I intended to lease instead of buy...lol. I didn't even mean to pull that one; the sales dude just assumed I was gonna finance it and we started talking price.
All said and done, I'm sure they still made a good amount of change on the vehicle, I think I saw someone on the boards that got the car for <30k.