QOTD: How Much Would YOU Pay Over MSRP?
Matt's story about car buyers being willing to pay a LOT over MSRP begs the question: How much over MSRP would YOU pay if you were buying a new car?
It's a pretty straightforward question, so I don't need a lot of preamble. There's no reason to pad the word count, either, to hit a minimum.
Let's just jump into it -- if you were buying a new car, how much over MSRP would you be willing to pay?
[Image: Prostock-studio]
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Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.
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About Tree Fiddy
There's MSRP and then there's market. I won't pay more than market. And if market doesn't seem to me like a good value, then I won't buy at all.
For decades market was usually under MSRP. Now on some vehicles it's over, and on many more vehicles it's MSRP plus a cheesy package of add-ons. And you have to wait some number of months. The catch is that late-model used vehicles are even more expensive, lately, because you don't have to wait for them.
I've looked seriously at a new car twice in the last year and both times backed away because I couldn't stomach the price. On the other hand, I just bought an older used car, which was expensive, but not the same sort of major financial decision. I decided to go ahead and buy it because the car involved (a responsible-adult-owned, never-tuned manual 335i convertible) is very hard to find and appears to be at the bottom of the depreciation curve.
I bought a new C63 AMG last year. I had to scour the earth for one, since they were getting hard to find. I had a great conversation with a dealer in California who was going to ship the car to New York and handle everything online. We got all the way to the end and they wanted several thousand dollars over sticker. I told them in no uncertain terms that as soon as I found a car that fit what I was looking for at sticker, they were going to lose the deal. I found said car in Boston (shout out to Herb Chambers, great to deal with!), and the Cali dealer lost the sale.
I'm ashamed to say - $2000 is my limit.
I recently bought a family member a new car and paid $2k over MSRP. There was little to no inventory around, all the dealers wanted that markup or more and used cars were stupidly priced.
My wife watched me stew about it for a week. It was a crappy deal, but we're done buying cars for a good long time.