Car buying and car ownership

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. :grin:

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.