Sean, I looked at the xA and xB both, but the Toyota/Scion salesguy I dealt with was terrible, and I liked the Fit too much. And I will be selling the truck myself. Let them pay me peanuts for it because I’m too lazy to put an ad in Craigslist? Pshaw. Geoff already has the specs and is talking to some people he knows, too.

I haven’t related my favorite car buying story, which is from when Misty & I were getting a car prior to me entering grad school. We’d been dealing with, oh, let’s call it Jim Smith Toyota in Hot Springs, AR. We’d settled on a car and decided that we didn’t want Toyota’s rip-off add-on of the day, the “road noise dampeners.”

To check prices, we stopped by the Toyota dealership in North Little Rock. We got out of our car and were immediately met by a salesman who had been trolling the parking lot. “What can I help you with?”

I told him, and added, “We’ll need one without the road noise dampeners.”

“Shoot, there’s nothing I can do about that. They come standard.”

I stared at him. “Really?” He nodded. “Because Jim Smith Toyota down in Hot Springs has cars without that option.”

The salesman said, “Well, I guess Jim Smith knows something I don’t.”

“I reckon so,” I told him. “You have a great night.” And we turned around and left. Total elapsed time: two minutes.

And Sean, no worries, I’m helping Stephen find buyers for the truck. Having just sold mine, I had three or four folks interested in it, so the folks who didn’t buy my old truck are going to find out about Stephen’s. Might not happen, but it’s worth spreading the word.

Also, when going to the dealership, ask if you can talk with the fleet manager. That is how I purchased my legacy. He said, 250 over invoice, that is what I can do. So we agreed on that. I ended up getting a bit more off with rebates and the difficulty they had in getting the car, but it was a fair deal to start with.

Please tell me you are also just selling the truck and not trading it, craigslist is your friend, especially with a truck in the south.

What was so ridiculous about the process was how _not special_ we were treated. Like Mike G. described, it was exactly the process you would expect if car buying were rational. It’s enraging that it’s not the norm.

Other “standard features” to be aware of and feel free to ignore when negotiating your price: pretty much any fee (”doc”, “prep”, etc.) that Edmunds doesn’t know about. Don’t necessarily expect the fee to disappear, but just mentally add it to whatever price he gives you and make sure you like it. I’ve had a salesman all but admit it’s crap, but he still had to show it on the sales sheet. To get to our price, he lowered the sale price of the car by exactly the doc fee so that it nulled out when he added it back in.

I also ran into one of the blatant lying snake types back when I was calling around about the uberwagon. I wanted a VERY specific and fairly rare option package on my car (to give you an idea, my Passat was on the boat on its way to North Carolina when the local salesman rerouted it). A salesman at one of the Atlanta dealerships (wish I could remember for sure which one) told me he had more than one set to arrive within a couple of weeks. When I double-checked with the local salesman, he called bullshit on it. When I told the Atlanta guy, he got all mad and offended that I would question his honesty… but he never called me back about having a car for me.