Buying experience

Buying a car is always exciting, but most people find it daunting. Compared to even 10-15 years ago, cars are better than ever and the market has become very competitive. Top it off with the stereotypical pushy sales people, car buying takes a lot of work! As cliche as it sounds, the best consumers can really do is use as much resources and walk in fully armed with knowledge.

With that said, I don't have any secret recipe to making the process easier, but I would like to share my experiences.

I went out shopping earlier in the summer when the the economy was worse off than it is now and manufacturers were offering up a lot of discounts. At that time, I looked at the Acura TL w/ Tech package, Infiniti G37, and the Genesis. All are very fine cars and most people would do just fine with any one of those choices. What really opened my eyes was how different the "buying" experience was with each of the dealerships I dealt with. The Acura salesman was by far the worst at playing all the typical games and came off as very pompous. What a douche!  I walked out after being more patient than I should have been. The Infiniti salesman seemed very inexperienced and seemed to go by the books. He tried the whole how much monthly payment can you afford tactic, but in the end, the manager stepped in and offered $34,500 for a G37 with premium and nav packages... not bad. Lastly, I went over to the Hyundai dealer. I dropped in on a weekday and there was only one salesman available, which meant waiting around for a while. He took me around for a very very short test drive and gave me a quote for around $39K. Although he was the busiest, he didn't try to play any games! I've always heard about the "low-end" car dealers being worse off than those from the luxury brands, but the absolute opposite seemed to be the case.

Long story short, when I went shopping around again this winter, I started looking at the Honda Accord EX-L V6, Hyundai Sonata 2.0T, and Mazda6s GT. Again, all the salespersons were very pleasant and straight forward with their pricing. I think the key here is going to the internet sales managers. They do tend to blow up your phones after you make a few clicks, but they all want to make a quick sale and avoid as much haggling as possible.

These were all very good cars and I was biased towards the Accord, despite being the most common and oldest design in the group. In the end, I went with the Genesis 4.6 because there were some steep discounts on the 2011s and I found it to be well worth the extra money over the others. The salesperson was outstanding and the buying process was as painless as it can be. He even replaced the "flying H" with a Genesis emblem on the trunk lid.