Car buying is one of the most stressful experiences. It does not have to be. But, for whatever reasons, it has become one. Why can't all dealers adopt a practice that Saturn adopted. No haggle price. If you sell the car at the sticker price to all customers, no body will haggle. Anyway, that is not the case. Hence,we have to haggle.
I recently bought a 2008 Toyota Camry Hybrid from Toyota Scion of Hollywood, California. It has been a good experience. They are still to install LoJack. I do not see anything going wrong there. Other than that open item, transaction was really smooth one.
I used 'get free quotes' feature from edmunds.com to invite quotes from a few dealers. This dealership was one of the dealerships which replied. No dealer replied with reasonable quotes. Most had no price quotes at all. All they did was to send one of their standard e-mails asking you to come and see the cars. One dealer cut and pasted MSRP. Why don't they understand that MSRP is available from many Internet sites and no customer is going to pay that price.
Randolph Villamil, the salesman at this dealership, was prompt and responsive. He sent first e-mail. Then called me. I set up the appointment. The salesman was there when I went to the dealership. He organized for the test drives of two cars I was interested in - Prius and Camry. It took a couple of e-mails from me to have him send me the proper quote. But, it was not too much of a time. May be he had to identify the car that he wanted to sell first, my color preferences etc.
I e-mailed him back with my offer which was a few hundred dollars less. Fair price calculated using valuable resources at www.carbuyingtips.com. He agreed to my offer and confirmed. I went to the dealership the same evening and finished the paperwork. The process took at most an hour.The finance person who did the paperwork was also quick and fast. He did offer usual stuff such as extended warranty, service plan etc. I had done my research and had found that most of such stuff is marked up quite a bit at dealerships. I declined all such extras and there was no pressure at all. Good thing.
Next day, I went and picked up my car. Randolph had readied the car promptly. He answered any questions I had. He told he would arrange for the LoJack guy to contact me to set up an appointment to install LoJack and that was it. One of the best car buying experiences. Best among the three experiences in last 10 years. Bargaining if any was a few e-mails.
So far positive experience with this dealership. Randolph, the salesman, seemed like a simple straight forward guy. No pressure tactics. Spends time to answer questions. Over all a nice guy.
I recommend this dealership and Randolph Villamil for buyers of Toyota in Los Angeles area.
Cheers!
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