Okay so I had a big long response typed, and.... accidentally clicked out and lost it so heres to a redraft from memory... (P.S. Just found the draft save feature!)
So quick disclosure for MA clients, MA is a bit of forbidden fruit with out of state dealers due to how they recognize out of state temp tags, for in state residents. From my understanding, MA will not recognize an out of state dealer temp tag for a MA resident, so if you live in MA and buy a car out of state you will not be able to legally drive your car until that dealer (and subsequently their title agency) gets your registration completed and sent to you. So big disclaimer there, we might still be able to help, but at the very least I hope this post is insightful to provide you with all the tools you need to secure a great deal in-state.
Now, if you are outside of MA, or are willing to deal with the extra steps and possible downtime associated with buying out of state, please reach out to us by using this inquiry form below, my rep Nick handles all Mazda inquiries personally and it costs nothing to talk with us. If you like a deal we put together for you, we will charge a service fee then (fully refundable if anything falls through for any reason prior to us securing a car, preparing contracts and scheduling delivery). Our service fee is typically $599, however Mazdas247 members are getting $200 off for a $399 service fee until further notice.
Auto Ninjas Inquiry Form - Mazdas247
Okay, before I jump into specific numbers, I also want to suggest anyone shopping a lease uses our new
Auto Ninjas Calculator Tool. This tool allows you to build your own lease and populate real manufacturer programs in an easy and transparent manner. You can use this as a source of truth to keep your dealers honest while you shop. Many dealer quotes are ambiguous intentionally to allow them to hide money with either rate markup (increasing the interest cost higher than the banks rate and collecting the markup as profit) or with other hidden fees or costs such as add ons and addendums.
I will get back to that (perhaps I should make a guide to using this), but lets look at the CX90 PHEV specifically now. CX-90s have about 2.5% markup from invoice, slightly higher if there are added accessories as those have higher markup rates. Below you can see a real CX-90 PHEV Premium invoice from one of our dealers, with their identifying info redacted.
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So as you can see, your left column is invoicing pricing, right column is MSRP pricing. This is a $55,930 MSRP car with a dealer invoice of $54,555. There are some codes everywhere but the two important ones are DH000544 and COOP1425 at the bottom, those represent financial values. DH stands for Dealer Holdback, and this one has a holdback of $544. The dealer pays Mazda $54,555 for this vehicle then once it is sold they are paid back $544 from dealer holdback, which is equal to 1% of pre-accessory/destination MSRP. The COOP field stands for Mazda's Co-Op program which is an advertising reimbursement program, each car they sell they get Co-Op funds added to a piggy bank that they can then claim reimbursements from. Spent $5,000 on a radio ad? Comes out of the co-op fund. This money is worth considering as it can be used, but also cannot be collected as profit directly. There is further dealer money the deeper behind the scenes you go, however that starts to get gray and fuzzy as typically only dealer principles/owners see all of those financial details, which I'm pretty certain will vary a lot from different qualification metrics.
Okay, so this is fine and good, you can see two other codes, EPLAN and SPLAN, EPLAN is Employee purchase price (4% back of invoice) and SPLAN is Supplier which is equal to invoice. So what does all this info mean? It gives you ideas of what money the dealer has to play with and where to negotiate to. Generally speaking, if you set your target to EPLAN and can get close you are at a phenomenal price point and should take that deal. Are there such things as better deals out there? Yeah, maybe, but you are at the point of diminishing returns. I wouldn't even hold firm to that number as a hard-fast rule, rather generally speaking I recommend shooting for 5%-6% off MSRP (with a reasonable dealer fee - more on that in a second) for a GOOD DEAL on a Mazda. As you can see, 6% off gets you within a couple hundred dollars of EPLAN price.
Now I will walk you through using our calculator tool to put this to real world use, but first - dealer fees. It is important to consider your own market as dealer fees vary a lot depending where you go in the country. In NJ, you will easily find $499-$899 as the average dealer fee. In NY and CA, they are capped to very low amounts, under $200. In Florida, it is not uncommon to find dealer fees as high as $1,500. Now generally speaking I would say my pricing rules should consider an average market dealer fee in your area, up to maybe $700 or so, after that you want to count the dealer fee against the discount. In other words, if the dealer is selling it for EPLAN but charging you $1500 in dealer fees, you should try to get at least $800 below EPLAN to offset the added cost. Now, this doesnt mean you should walk on a dealer because they have high fees, simply you just need to consider the overall math. Some of the best deals in the country we get have very high dealer fees, but their discounts more than offset it.
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So lets start with the vehicle, a 2024 Mazda CX-90 PHEV Premium AWD.
We will go ahead and add our location info, we will use my home zip of 33914 for this, we do ask for both Registration zip and Dealer zip, Dealer zip is only important for certain brands that base programs on dealer location, however MOST brands base on customer zip - Mazda is based on customer registration so you can use your zip for both fields here. You will also enter your Credit Score here (estimate - we will likely move this field on a future update so its not under registration).
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Now lets set our pricing based on what I shared, $55,930 MSRP and a target discount of 6%.
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Now we select our lease terms, by default 36/10k is the norm, however its worth exploring various terms (you can change this on the next page). Mazda often has better terms at 33, 30, 39 or 24 months - not always but this can vary. On PHEVs, 24 month can be advantageous with the high incentive loads.
We will also set Documentation Fee (dealer fees) here as well as how we want to structure our out of pocket cost. Suggested amount is your inception fees, which we offer as an available option (details will be broken down on next page) or you can enter a custom amount, for this I will use a custom amount of $2,000. Please note this amount is TOTAL cash out of pocket, so no extras for first payment, tax, registration, etc - that is all already accounted for. If you want to cover all of those up front, select the "1st month, taxes and inceptions" option.
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All of these details can be edited on the next screen so don't sweat if you want to try different options! Click Next and you have a real lease payment!
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Now we can change fields as we please and the calculator will do all the rest of the work. Want to try a 24 month with 15k miles allowed? Lets take a look.
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But wait, what if you have a Mazda at home? Let's look for some Loyalty rebates by clicking the Incentives box...
Great $500 Mazda Loyalty Reward selected and accounted for! We are working on some better descriptions (very complex to do on all brands) but hopefully they are descriptive enough to get you where you need, always welcome to check in with us for some clarification!
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Great! Now you have a fully legitimized and accurate quote for a 24 month, 15k annual mileage lease on a $55,930 MSRP CX-90 PHEV Premium plus using accurate taxes and fees for a Florida lease in my zip code and a 6% target discount. Now I can get some dealer quotes and compare to how they compare to my numbers. If they say they are giving you a 6% discount with an $899 doc fee (my example) and they are showing you a payment of $750/mo you know there is some funny business going on and money being hidden somewhere.
I apologize for such a long write-up, I hope it was helpful and informational! If you guys think I should make a proper write up guide for this, let me know. And I would love some feedback from everyone on this tool and any suggestions we can do to make it better, I work very closely with our CTO Chris and developer Adam, both in house, we meet daily and put together tech changes all the time.
Cheers!