I haven’t found anything from googling to suggest that you need to change your car insurance immediately before leaving the lot.
Spending time arranging for financing prior to going to the dealership would obviously save you time at the dealership. 
Also, since my current car is 11 years old, has limited coverage, and I was keeping it to give to my daughter, I didn’t have the option to avoid arranging for insurance on the spot.
I can see how not having to deal with financing at the dealership or new insurance would cut significant time off the process.
Yeah, I’m a firm believer in getting everything done and finalized (that you can) prior to going to the dealership.
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I do the XLB/Fatboy method exclusively for car purchasing.
It’s negotiated all by email. I just drop in to give them a check and get the keys. There may be a very perfunctory “Would you like to get the…” but even that is often skipped. They know that it is a complete waste of time for this type of buyer.
It works well enough that I don’t think dropping in right before closing is strictly necessary, but I did that on a car purchase several years ago because that is just how the timing worked out. It took about an hour to get out of there and that finance guy was working at warp speed to get out and enjoy his Saturday night. He did not even attempt to sell us a extended maintenance contract or other similar nonsense.
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I spent a small amount of time working at a Mazda dealer as a young man and we (finance, manager, salesperson) absolutely would stay late to close a deal that day if we had a late arriving walk up that was serious.
This happens fairly often and the amount of people that will flake out of a future appointment is significant. We would definitely speed things up but it would still be an hour or so easily. The feature walk-through and detail would be postponed, but not the deal itself.
Postscript to my Mazda adventure:
Even though I didn’t intend to trade in my 2013 Mazda 3 (manual trans), the salesperson convinced me to let the dealership drive and appraise it. The scumbags then offered me only 1K (despite Carvana saying it was worth at least 6K), which made the decision easy to simply give it to my daughter, who is set to give birth to my first grandchildren in a couple of weeks.
She and my son-in-law then decided that they’d probably just sell/trade the car in order to purchase a new car, and after a lot of back-and-forth with them about the different forms we’d need in order to do a gift transaction and transfer ownership with a car titled in a different state, I had an epiphany at 5am…“Duh, just try to sell it to Carvana and give them the cash.”
I just dropped off the car at Carvana, and left with a check for $6,200.
I like my new Mazda, but fuck that dealership…especially since during their final “clean-and-buff,” they apparently didn’t check/refill the wiper fluid, making me first worry that there was something wrong with the wiper system when I tried to clean the windshield while driving.
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I learned a few things about Car Talk. I remember listening every Saturday morning on actual radio. Feeling very nostalgic now.
In this months installment of how much did Melk get ripped off, we just paid ~$350 for a guy to come to my house and put a new battery in our minivan.
Here’s the details. It a 2021 Chrysler Pacifica. Apparently it has two batteries, it was the main one that got replaced. Came back after a long family trip and battery was entirely dead. Called AAA to either get jumped or towed. This was all done online (now when you call they tell you to use the website if you can for faster response). After we set everything up there was a prompt asking if we wanted a quote for battery replacement. We said sure and it was $3XX. While waiting for the guy, Mme Melkerson called a few places near our house including dealer (lol) and they were all in the same ballpark.
Guy shows up and says, “Yeah, you really need a new battery” (big surprise on that being his diagnosis). He did it and we paid, the CC reader prompted for tip (of course). After tip our cost was $356.
So, how bad did we get ripped off?
You can get a battery for like $100 and it takes about 10 minutes to install with basic hand tools, so the usual amount. If you could have got your car jumped and drove to an auto parts store they’d likely install for free.
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If the battery couldn’t have been jumped, you could have had AAA tow you to an auto parts store.
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Battery by itself is $100-150, getting any kind of a mechanic to go to your place gonna be at least $150.
I wouldn’t have tipped anything.
Yeah, we considered that. I’m not installing the battery myself, so we called a few places we could have had it towed to and they would put in a battery and they all gave us quotes in the $300-$400 range.
One place we didn’t call was the nearest Autozone, because we tried to get them to install a battery a long time ago and they said they couldn’t do it. I don’t know if we just caught them on a bad day.
We tried this once at an Autozone and they refused to do it. So all the places we called were more full service places (and the dealer).
When I looked up the battery online the first hit I got said $150.
I’m completely useless at anything involving tools, so installing it myself was never going to happen. Although, I have little doubt it would be easy for most people like you say. While waiting, I did watch a youtube of how to do it on my specific vehicle and it did seem like a lot more than 10 min for a guy who really knew his shit (maybe 20 min as the battery is mounted in such a way that it doesn’t pop right out). . I suspect it would have taken me about an hour (not including the time to watch the vid).
Edit: Just asked Mme Melkerson and she said it definitely took the AAA guy more than 20 min to install. Probably around 30.
Mme Melkerson handled the payment and didn’t tip much maybe like $20.
I guess there was some significant value in having him come to us to fix. I was able to get some productive work done instead of spending my morning dealing with this.
I’m mildly more worried that the dead battery is a sign of other issues. There’s a chance that’s all it was but there’s also a risk it dies again in a few weeks and you paid $350 when the real issue was something else. Modern cars and their electrical systems can be very wonky.
Yeah, we’re gonna take it in to get checked out for this reason. It’s due for an oil change anyway. It wouldn’t surprise me if that ends up being the case.
Last winter I bought a new battery for a Mazda 3, and the clerk at the strip mall, auto parts chain store installed the new battery for free in about 10 minutes. He seemed happily surprised at the cash tip I gave him.
I’d probably also tip in that spot.
For my vehicle, I’m not sure 10 min is realistic for most people. It requires an extra step.
Autozone, O’reilly’s, etc all will install batteries for free ime.
About a year ago, I had a check engine light. Guy said I needed $1500 of work. Got it done. Drove it off the lot, 30 seconds later light came back on. Disconnected then reconnected the battery to reboot the computer. Fixed it.
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