I agree with you that for any car purchasing price comparison, we should always compare the price before TTL, not after, even if we don’t mention the “TTL” explicitly. OTD price sometimes is confusing as each state has different sales tax rate, title、license、and doc fees.
Personally, I’d find these conversations much more useful if everyone quoted their deals and “% off MSRP” figures as everything paid to the dealer with the sole exception of statutory fees and taxes collected on behalf of the customers’ state and local governments ... meaning, all cost prior to the addition of sales tax, title transfer fees, registration fees, safety and emissions certifications, and any other required environmental impact fees — such as New Jersey’s $7 ($1.50 per tire) ‘new tire tax’.
The prices shared here should INCLUDE the dealer’s doc fees (and any other fees they might tack on). Doc fees aren’t passed through to revenue agencies — they are direct payments to the dealer. Any ‘fixed-price’ fees that stay at the dealership (including doc fees, destination or delivery charges, VIN etching, etc.) should be included.
So you’ve got your bottom-line sticker MSRP (including all upgrade option and delivery/destination charges) and your dealer-discounted price. Then you get into games with rebates and incentives.
If your (pre-tax) OTD price is $1500 lower than it otherwise would be because you took advantage of a manufacturer’s brand loyalty / active military / first responder incentive discount or credit, than it would be helpful to have that information. If that money comes out of MAZDA’s pocket, and not the dealer’s, than I can’t really expect to get the same price from that same dealer if I don’t qualify for the same offer.
If you get quoted one price if you use Mazda’s 0% financing offer but an even lower one if only you pay cash, that’s super-helpful to know, too.
This exercise is pretty pointless without apples to apples comparisons. There’s enough apparent discontinuities in regional supply (and thus regional pricing) already.
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FWIW, it was my intention to agree to a cash price with my dealer before determining how I would pay ... as I was seeking quotes for an outright sale concurrent with a separate set of quotes based on the available leasing options ... but it occurs to me, that as a time saving measure, I had them go ahead and see if I qualified for Mazda’s 0% financing offer (which was allegedly restricted to ‘well-qualified buyers’) while still just in the “getting offers” part of the process.
My plan called for returning home, researching (by the methods explained in a previous post) what a fair cash price in my area actually was, and coming up with a counter-offer (and the hard ceiling lying somewhere between their initial offer and mine which I wouldn’t go over).
Getting approved for the 0% made me abandon my plans to get quotes from my banks (and elsewhere) ... why bother, I thought? How could anyone beat 0%? Wouldn’t that just be a waste of time?
[ You see, I haven’t been in a car dealership in 21 years. I’ve bought my previous cars (and most of the rest of my major purchase with cash). I move around too much to have ever wanted to invest in a house. I’ve got good consumer credit, but I had no history (since paying off my first car loan and student debt over 16 years ago) of installment loans.
When the dealership told me Mazda uses Chase Bank to back their car loans, I laughed ... because I got turned down for a lousy Amazon Prime card last year by JPMC because of their long memory of my hosing them 20+ years ago when I got myself in a world of hurt sophomore year after spending all my college savings and tuition money on skydiving lessons and then bought my first ‘high-performance’ parachute from a private seller with a very ill-advised cash advance with something like a 5% fee and 29.99% APR on my first go-around with their bank ... I certainly wasn’t expecting that to be an option for me
*
* Turns our Mazda only just recently finalized a deal to switch their sales financing to a private-label branding administered by Toyota.
Leases might still go though Chase, though.]
So, I got my numbers (but I assumed those numbers I found online excluded things like the doc fee. I actually still haven’t figured that out
. In any case, I should have assumed that they did. Or assumed the dealer could eat almost all of their doc fee by reducing the asking price commensurately. At least, I probably should have brought it up.
I also didn’t think to ask if I decided to pay cash after all, if they could give me an even better price than the one we agreed to that next day (on the assumption I was taking the financing).
I haven’t shopped for a car in 20 years, but I HAVE seen the lat 20 years of car commercials. I knew from the ads 0% financing offers weren’t an always-there option. And I also remember seeing that 0% (or other significantly low finance rate offers) were frequently advertised alongside “dealer cash” rebates or “zero down” offers in an either/or fashion. Buy this car, get $2000 back on signing ... OR ... buy this car, and get 0% interest for 60 months ....
My understanding of this was, you can save $2000 now, and pay it back over time, or you can pay it now, but save on the financing over time. Your choice. We’ll get our money in the end, anyway.
So, when I (confirmed online that night) that Mazda was offering the 0%, but was advertising no paired cash incentive as an either/or, I simply assumed that wasn’t an option. It didn’t occur to me to figure out if I could have negotiated lower on the premise of paying cash after all. Maybe I could have? But I didn’t think to ask, so it doesn’t matter. I’d not slept more than 3 hours in any 24 in over a week. I’d probably still come out ahead at 0% ... but I might have learned enough to help me reevaluate my understanding of what a mutually fair price really was.
Too late for me, but maybe this addition to the discussion can help the next person?