when I was a teenager I owned a muscle car, now I want the exact opposite.

June 29, 2010 9:19 PM

Should I expect to pay MSRP for a new ford fiesta currently for sale at my local dealer?

I've been wanting a new car for a while and have narrowed it down to a fiesta or a fit. I test drove a fit, but didn't like the interior much. The new fiestas are finally arriving and serendipitously my local dealer has a few with the features I am looking for. I am planning to see about test driving one tomorrow. I've done all my edmunds research on this and other cars and have gotten quotes on hondas that fell in line with my expectations, but these are new and high demand cars with no data on comparable purchases etc. Should I expect to pay the sticker price? The car is only priced ~650 over invoice. I am not in a rush to buy, but I am currently without a car and could see myself walking away with a car tomorrow if I like it.

Also, a few have options on the sticker price that are floor mats and cargo organizers, anyone know if bargaining those off the sticker are an option?

posted by Large Marge to Shopping (4 answers total)

TrueCar is a good reference for order of magnitude pricing that you can get without any negotiation. As such, it provides a nice upper bound to start negotiations at. It suggests paying more like invoice price (or ~$600 off sticker) is appropriate for Berkeley, CA.

Remember, it never hurts to play dealerships against each other. The worst they'll do is say no.
posted by saeculorum at 10:30 PM on June 29, 2010

It's a brand new car with a fair amount of interest, and they're only just now starting to trickle into dealerships. I'm not surprised that they're insisting on MSRP. This was the case when we bought our Honda Fit, which I paid MSRP for. The markup on these smaller cars is pretty small so there's not much wiggle room for negotiation, but you may luck out.
posted by zsazsa at 11:58 PM on June 29, 2010

We had an excellent experience using carsdirect.com to buy a new car (a Honda Civic EX-L) just last month. Within an hour of submitting a request through the website, we got an emailed bid that was at least $2000 lower than I had expected. When we showed it to a more conveniently-located dealer (and played just a bit of good-cop-bad-cop), they matched the price and threw in the dealer options ($350 worth) they had already installed on the car. The fact that this happened at the end of the month didn't hurt, I'm sure.
posted by DrGail at 3:42 AM on June 30, 2010

I don't have advice specific to the Fiesta, but in case it helps your research more generally: "invoice" is pretty much a made-up number. The dealers get incentives and holdbacks from the manufacturer that significantly reduce their actual cost. We used Consumer Reports's auto-buying guide to get the dealer's real cost, for a negotiating floor.

If you're a USAA or Costco member, it might be worth checking out their car-buying programs, too, if you don't like to negotiate. In our experience buying a car last week, USAA's price was very good, and we used it to make a deal with a different dealer who had the car we wanted on the lot.

Finally: Don't buy the car tomorrow.
posted by palliser at 11:44 AM on June 30, 2010