After several days of appraisals/math/salespeople, I have an appointment with Dealer A tomorrow to place the order. All specs are already on paper, they say it will be a 10-min signature thing. Dealer A is a 90 minute drive from me, assuming no traffic.

Dealer B is 15 minutes from me, but Dealer A has beaten their price by $400 (mostly by the math involved in offering me $1000 less on my trade-in).

I'll be stopping by B en route to A tomorrow with a final opportunity for them to get my business by showing them what A has offered. (It will also save me 3+ hours of driving tomorrow.)

This is the part I'm worried about, since Dealer B is obviously where I'll want to get serviced: Dealer B's sales manager told me that their fleet of 30-ish loaner cars are only for people who've given them their business. So if I ever need to leave my car with them, I won't have transportation home.

Do you believe they really wouldn't give me a loaner, or they're just saying that to push me to buy from them?

 

Yup there is no reason to give you a loaner if you did not buy it from them. Wether we agree or not with the dealer they can do what they want. So fo $400.00 is it worth it when you add in gas and mileage to the other dealer?

I agree with giving them a shot to match it. Maybe see if they can throw in some extras if they can't match it.

 

$400 is not worth it.

 

Thats my point.

 

I've gotten three or four free loaners taking my car in for warranty work, which I bought used at a Toyota lot *shrug*

 

It is all about what the dealer is willing to do. I think IMO the dealer that won't give the loaner is foolish, because they make more money in service then they do on the car sale. Hence the stealership comments all the time.

 

Hell my MINI is out of warranty and I still ask for loaners at the very least a courtesy drive to my house so that I can drive my wagon. Like posted above $400 is not worth the hassle at all. Waste of time, gas, and your sanity.

 

I've had all our MINIs serviced at a dealership which hadn't sold us a MINI until 2 months ago. Guessing.... a dozen visits to service and only once was I denied a loaner due to no availability.

Not saying your Dealer B won't deny you. But if they do... they suck.

 

Tough call. Sadly, dealer A's price may go up (if it isn't in writing) and dealer B might give you better service, the loaner car, have a superior service department, etc.

And you'll pay for towing to dealer A, or pay for a rental car at dealer B and over 5 years you are looking at about 20 vents a day.

 

Regardless of what dealership you buy it at both will service the car. So if you buy from A you are not obligated to go to A for service. I bought mine from a Subaru dealership and the MINI dealership took me in with open arms.

 

Right--but do they give you a loaner?

 

To me, $400 would be chicken-feed compared to 15 versus 90-minute (assuming no traffic) drives. Having your local dealership on your side would probably be well worth it over the long haul. You might also try to evaluate their respective service records before making a final decision, however.

 

Usually, a dealer that has 30+ cars in their service loaner fleet, has a fairly outstanding service dept. Otherwise, they would have no need to depreciate that many cars at a time. People just wouldn't service there if they sucked. Also, proximity is a huge factor for me. I had to go 165mi. each way to my dealer. Not a fun drive, and it ends up eating up most of a day. Yes, that is the closes dealer to me. I'd walk right in to Dealer B, and tell them to meet me in the middle, and drop the price $200 and sign the damned paperwork. Then take the 2.5 hours of your life that you just saved, and go do something else!

 

Give dealer B one more chance to meet dealer A's price - if they even make it a little closer buy it from them.

 

I would stay local. $400 is not worth it.

I got my dealer to budge $1000 on price by having a CarMax appraisal on my trade-in. I'd spend 90 mins on the way to Dealer B getting an independent appraisal of the trade-in.

 

bought my car from a dealer 45 mins away ( primarily because they had a coupe i could test drive no roadsters available at the time).
made appointment for first service over 3 weeks in advance was told NO LOANER available.
at least in n.y. loaner doesn't seem possiable

 

Carmax was my first step in this process--before I visited any dealers. That number is almost entirely (if not totally entirely) the reason for the price difference; A, in writing, will match Carmax. B offered $1500 less than Carmax and then moved to $1000 less when I told them about the matching.

So that's basically what this little visit to them is for.

And this

is the plan.

 

Side note: dealer A started with an hour of sweetness and light, promising me a build spot this week and also promising that B has no openings, then switched to hard-sell, insulting the other dealership, and annoyance at my "let me think about it" when they had assumed my visit to them was a "done deal." (They actually said that.) I don't like businesses (or people) whose plea includes badmouthing (and/or speaking for) the other side. And I told them that.

B's retort was "we can always trade a build-order spot with friendly dealers elsewhere...now." And frankly, even if it were to be a month or two, that's not a factor for me. As awesome as MINIs are, it's not an emergency: my car runs just fine.

Let's just say...I'm rooting for B. In a few more hours, this will be settled. Stay tuned...

 

Bad mouthing makes me so mad. I hate when people do that. As a detailer I have people say "oh this guy sux, he screwed up my car" etc. I just say "oh I don't know them sorry".

But have them throw in some accessories if they can't match the price I got rally lights and an armrest for almost free all installed.

 

Had a similar situation.

My dealership A is about an hour and twenty minutes from my house. It's where I first stopped to test drive and pick their brains. I told them I was just looking and getting questions answered and that I would buy from whoever gave met he best deal. The MA scoffed at me and said "With MINIs, the price is what it is." They were decent in answering questions but nothing really outstanding. Also, the cars they gave me to test drive were literally running on fumes. The gas warning light was on the entire time on both models I drove and I got less than 10 minutes in each one. I found that to be sorta rude. *shrug*

When I called dealership B(which is two hours away), they talked to me on the phone for half an hour, told me how many slots they had in their build, and that the still had a priority one slot open for July. I drove up there a week after I was at A and signed the papers.

One week after signing my papers(two weeks out from test driving at A), dealership A contacted me for the first time to see when I wanted to come down and sign the papers for my car since I had emailed them my build from MINI's site the day that I test drove. I explained that since they were unwilling to negotiate price and I hadn't heard from them at all that I chose to go with another dealership. They tried to tell me that they had already ordered my car and acted incredibly put upon that I went with someone else. To me, that just reaffirmed why I went with the other dealership. There's no way that they got a car into production that quickly and no way they would build a custom order car without getting their deposit from me. Hell, even if I DID go with them, I had made changes to the build when I ultimately ordered it.

I'm extremely happy that I gave my business to the dealership that's further from me even though it's going to cost me more in gas. It's moot because I received a thousand times better service and got a better price over dealer A anyway.

 

$400 over the loan period costs, what? $4/mo? Every month when you think of how glad you are that your dealer is only 15min out, you'll be glad you spent the $4.

 

I agree with everybody else. Stay local.

 

Wish I had a dealer that close. My closest dealer is over 4 hours away, and I bought mine at a dealer over 9 hours away. I have never had a problem getting a loner when getting service, regardless of where I bought the car. Of course it may help that it's only been back to the dealer (any dealer) twice in almost 10 years and 284,000 miles. And those were over simple recall items.

Nik

 

Like a said the dealership here does give me loaners even though I am out of warranty. Now this is where I am at right now becuase I am moving soon so that might be something different when I get to Cali.


As far as originally when I bought my car in Hawaii I did not get a loaner but, the gave me a courtesy ride everytime I had to leave my car there even if it was for a half hour(I didn't take the half hour one). The reason they did not give loaners out was because they had none. They had no room for cars expect the 3 or 4 on the showroom floor and maybe a half dozen out on the lot. But that still did not stop them from welcoming me like I had bought the car from them. The first day I took it there was to buy windshield wipers which I did not know was covered under warranty and they replaced them and did a free oil change. Yeah the few short months I had my MINI before moving they did a lot of work for me and made going there one of the best expierences I had with a dealership ever. I had that same response when I got to Florida until they decided out of the blue to **** can our SA and bring someone from VW over and she is worthless and has made going to the dealership suck really bad.

 

From experience (since I added the Bluetooth package at the last minute) that on a 60 month 1.9% lease $500 adds $10 to the monthly payment. So it can be a little more than you expect, but not enough to really change anything.