About the car? I dunno

Hey, I’ll make you feel really bad: I’m getting a GT-R to test for five days in Nevada at the beginning of April.

AMG benz….Now Black Edition Benz.
For when your office lot is full of E and S classe. And when there are two or three AMG’s at your golf club.

Mugen Honda ? Finally, and only 7k over sticker at my local dealer.

Ford Mustang whatever editions…same deal. GT40, make an offer…ha ha.

The Stealership will mark up to whatever they can get. Even my local BMW shop, overall decent folk, laughed when I read out the sticker for a Z8, which was “make us an offer at least 25k over sticker”.

Think of it this way. Each dealer has to eat any number of slow sellers. The manufacturer can toss them some halo cars to partially make up for the abuse they take with the slow sellers.

We, as ever, are the victim.

So many cars these days sell at invoice, it’s refreshing to see cars that sell for full list or more. Believe it or not, the dealership needs the money.

Only if your hair dryer can melt paint. The only tape stripes are the side ones.

A FGT with 2000 miles will still bring in $10-20k over MSRP, esp if it’s a rare color/stripe delete car. The only cars trading at less than original sticker are either high milers and/or salvage title cars.

Never thought I would be able to justify a mid six figure pricetag on any car, but the FGT is just that good!

Mark-ups suck, but few cars exist that will outperform this car. Even if you pay $130k, few cars can equal the performance and daily driveability of the GTR. Off the top of my head, other cars in this price range would be… New Audi R8, New Porsche Turbo, New Mercedes Benz CLK63 AMG Black Series, Used Ferrari 360 Modena, Used Lamborghini Gallardo.

A search for an Audi R8 turned up ONE (1) R8 locally for under $130k, with many others marked up to as much as $184k. The Porsche Turbo hovers right around that price, about $10-$20k more. The MB is selling for MORE than MSRP at $180k. And the used Ferrari and Lamborghini really wont do well for daily driving as maintenence will kill ya!

None of these are quite as fast and maintenence would likely cost you more, but wouldn’t you rather be driving one of these nameplates instead? I know I would! Besides, no one i know drives expensive sports cars everyday. Now if you want something faster than these big names, that’s cheaper to maintain, and only care to spend $70k, get a Corvette Z06… it may have taken a while (2 years or so?), but no more mark-ups for this old dog.

Or find a good tuner shop and have them build you something (STI or EVO, for example) that should kill all of the above for less money.

Or you can get Brand X for the same price, with 620 horses and 3300 pounds of meat on the hoof, and it won’t cost you $1,000 each time you drive it hard.

I’m just sayin’

I do hope you find one though, cause it sure is a sweet car!

Exactly, often when the manufacturer behaves like an “orifice” it should not be surprising that the dealer behaves like an “orifice” too.

Count me among the suckers, btw. I just try not to consider buying a performance car as anything other than a money-wasting proposition.

Consider this scenario at any dealer: sales person gets a cancellation on one of these hot in demand vehicles. Same sales person gets offered a consideration on the side. What do you think will happen.

You can replace sales person by other titles or positions.

The “games” start from the manufacturer to the dealer by attaching a myriad of “strings” to allocating the cars, they games keep on going, and going, and going.

One example: the dealer has to take 5 non selling “dogs” to get 1 hot number, and buy 20K of special tools to get the 1 hot number with a 10K gross profit at MSRP. With the second hot selling number several months in the future.

You are correct in stating that Nissan will ramp up production in the near future. Patience….

The Nissan dealer I used to work for was boasting about getting an allocation of 6 of them(I’ll belive it when I see it), but the talk was of 25k over.

Saw a Ford GT at a local dealer here. they sold two of them, both white models. 250K was the DSRP, the dealer suggested retail price. I asked if the customer got a spare GT at that price and they did not think it funny.

I saw the same thing, except the dealer was only asking $200k. At least the Ford GT seems to be somewhat collectable and has probably held its value fairly well. I wonder how much a lightly used Ford GT would go for now that they are no longer manufactured. Recently, I remember the Shelby GT500 typically had a dealer mark-up of greater than 50% of the MSRP during it’s first year. I don’t know how that has changed since. I remember when the PT Cruiser came out, people were paying a huge premium for those as well. I undertstand the phenomena, but I don’t think you’ll ever catch me paying a premium for any car.

3800lbs

[/all comparisons to previous gen Skylines]