Why do I say that? Well, I’ve been searching for a new car to buy. No, not a brand new car, I don’t want to mess with the depreciation. But a good used car. What I REALLY want is a Honda Accord Coupe V6 with a 6-speed manual. However, those pretty much don’t exist used so I’m mostly looking at 4-bangers with the 5-speed manual transmission.
But finding one in Tucson or Phoenix that’s a good price and certified used is REALLY hard. And some of the people I’ve dealt with are, shall we say, less than honest at times. For instance, there’s a large dealership here that has a 2003 Honda Accord Coupe 4-cyl with a 5-speed manual for sale. I first looked at the car a little over a week ago and test drove it and it wasn’t too bad. However, it has one of those big-ass mufflers on it that (sadly) my generation typically put on them. You know the ones, they make a bunch of noise and piss everybody else off.
Anyway, the dealer’s story on the muffler is that an older (well, not 20’s) person owned the car and hit the original muffler and punctured it while backing up. Where he was, he couldn’t buy a normal one, so it was the choice between a chromed-out one that was really annoying, or the one that’s on the car now.
Ok, fine, I guess I can deal with that. But at $17,123 (well, I think they quoted me $17,233, but it was listed on their website for $17,123 so I was going to push that price to start with if/when I started bargining), I wanted to wait a little bit (just didn’t like that muffler and there are a couple scratches on the back bumper).
So, over this weekend I found out that they still had the car and so I went over to look at it again. I test drove it again and started talking to them about actual prices and stuff. Brought up the $17,123 and we started from there. But I found out that it’s NOT certified used (despite them being a Honda dealership) because of the muffler. Of course, THEY claim that the ONLY thing that kept it from being certified was the muffler but I’m sure that the guy doing inspections saw that muffler and said no and moved to the next car without checking anything else. I mean, would you see something like that muffler that is an automatic rejection (not a factory install, not a Honda part), but continue to do the rest of the check for the heck of it? I didn’t think so…
Anyway, that made their price about $1,000 too much because it didn’t have the warranty. I told them that and they said they couldn’t drop that much and so I said bye (well, I actually said it was $1,500 too much because it had a new paint-chip taken out of the passenger door and so that combined with the scratches on the rear bumper amounted to $500 to me).
So now we’re at yesterday (Monday). I did a search for more Honda’s in the area and that car is still available but guess what? The price is NOW $16,188 (was $17,123 if you remember). Amazing! They dropped the price by $1,000 (or close enough). Wonder why that is…
But I didn’t call them or get ahold of them at that point because I figured that it didn’t hurt to wait a bit (getting bad feelings about the car as time goes on).
So last night I get an email from the salesman. He said that he’s willing to take another $495 off of the price of the car (in addition to the $400 he originally said he’d take off) because that’s how much they paid for the certification and so that would make it (according to him) $16,338 (do the math by the way… $17,123 - $400 - $495 != $16,338) .
So I was then pretty happy to email him back and ask a simple question: I’m confused… I was just looking at your website and the price quoted is $16,188. But you just quoted me $16,338. What’s the difference between those quotes?
No, I have not heard back from him yet (to be fair, I did write last night at 6 PM or so). But I’m hoping I’ll hear back from him today to see how he responds. But it makes me realize how much I really can NOT trust salesmen. This whole experience has shown me a LOT of ways that they play with the figures and try to get the most money from you (or me I guess) as possible. Yes, I knew they did that before, but I guess I didn’t realize the extent that they’d go to try and rip you off!!
New experiences. Guess those are the best way to learn 