Buying a car remotely - what do I do?

I'm stuck in a situation where we need to get a new car (wifecar is totaled), but need to do so quickly. The rental we currently have is on our dollar.

What I'm looking for is a Mazda 5. Almost all of these are 1.5hr+ away and at dealers only open during normal business hours (i.e. I'm at work). I can't really burn a ton of vacation to drive around and see these/negotiate with a dealer. I will probably end up sacrificing a half day to go and pick up whichever car I end up with.

I figure my best bet is to: choose the one or two I like the best, and negotiate over the phone. But I suck at dealing with dealers. Of the 17 cars I've had only 1 was purchased from a dealer, and at $3000 there wasn't really a lot to lose anyway. So what questions should I be asking? When does the negotiating come in? How do I make sure the car isn't a pile of crap over the phone? What about email... would that work better?

I have negotiated over email before but it was a new car, and I'd feel hesitant to talk prices with a dealer before seeing and driving something used.

I have however bought a used Mazda5 before long distance oddly enough. A kind GRMer went to look at it (syntheticblinkerfluid if I remember right, Thanks!!!) so I booked a train seat, and bought it to drive home. I paid full price but felt it was fair.

Everyone has a phone. Ask the sales guy to take a video of it, walking around it, starting it, etc. and send it to you. Any good sales guy would be happy to.

I used to hold this hesitance to negotiate price on a car I haven't seen. I still prefer negotiating in person, but so much is done over the internet now that the idea that negotiating on an unseen car is verboten seems outmoded. My last car was bought from 8 hours away. It was a Honda CPO, so there was a bit of assurance from that. I had them send me a bunch of photos, and do a video walk-around. I made a tentative offer that they accepted. They had approximately the cheapest CPO car on AutoTrader and we both knew it, so I only moved the needle a little. You can generally assume that you're not going to get the price to go down from your pre-negotiated price unless the car was misrepresented. I arrived, went over the car thoroughly, took it for a test drive, signed the papers.

MDJeepGuy wrote: Everyone has a phone. Ask the sales guy to take a video of it, walking around it, starting it, etc. and send it to you. Any good sales guy would be happy to.

This is exactly what I did. I bought a car from Sacramento, California while I am in south Florida. I asked for pictures and when I was happy, right before witing the money, I had the salesman on facetime walking around the car.

I had a very good experience and the car was just as expected.

With that being said, 1.5hrs away is nothing. Go on a Sunday or Saturday and look at the car if you are in any doubt after getting the pictures.

I agree with the posts above. It's easy, I do it a lot, and am in fact doing it now. To some degree, there has to be a tiny bit of leap of faith involved, but if you do your homework, you should be OK. Ask if it went through the dealers' service department, because it should have. Ask for the report from that. Doesn't "guarantee" anything, but it helps, and it lets the dealer know you're not some uneducated moron who will buy the car because the paint is shiny. Ask for any picture you want, if they balk or hesitate then that's a red flag to me. As for negotiating price, it can start anytime. Be sure to ask what their dealer doc fee is...some dealers charge $150, some charge $999, be sure you know it up front. Use the internet to your advantage. You can say "I like your car, but dealership X in Tampa (or wherever) has the same car for $1500 less".

Slippery wrote: With that being said, 1.5hrs away is nothing. Go on a Sunday or Saturday and look at the car if you are in any doubt after getting the pictures.

This is the south.... things aren't open on Sundays. Or reasonable hours on a Saturday. Plus, waiting until the weekend is costing me another $30/day.

(nothing was open this past weekend because snow)

Is this a Mazda dealer or a used car dealer?

dean1484 wrote: Is this a Mazda dealer or a used car dealer?

I have like 5 or 6 on my list... all are at used dealers/other dealers. Most promising one isn't opening until noon today, because snow.

When buying a car site unseen, I very much prefer to deal with the name brand car dealers instead of mom and pop shops. Has always worked out much better for me. I'm looking at two cars right now...one in AZ and one in Chicago, and I'm in Atlanta.

These are at large name brand dealers - just not Mazda dealers.

i did all the Forte negotiations via email. The dealer was 3.5 hours one way from me in Ohio. I made the deal contingent on the test drive and physical walk around. Even the trade in was done with pictures and details. Worked out well.

I'm on this boat looking at '02-'03 WRX's. Contemplating long distance buys myself, so far I can't get Mr Autotrader Lister to answer a damn email/text though. Opening up my searches to ~300 miles away.

Well, this is going quite poorly. It's like people don't want my business.

I've been using both phone and email. Some dealers can't be bothered to send any photos of a vehicle, send a carfax, or even just call me back. I've been in contact with over 10 dealers. And I don't feel like my search is narrowing, I feel like its expanding :(

$30 a day is nothing compared to getting burned on a car transaction in the thousands or tens of thousands.

I've had very poor luck buying cars out of state, even with having PPI's done etc. At this point I'm extremely wary of buying out of state and won't do it unless I can go see/drive/feel the car in person.

Unless prohibited by state law, you should be able to buy a car on Saturday and maybe even Sunday.

docwyte wrote: $30 a day is nothing compared to getting burned on a car transaction in the thousands or tens of thousands.

Indeed. If I don't find something I'm comfortable with soon, I'll extend the rental again. But also, I'm a cheapass. The monthly cost for my car is less than 2 days of this rental.

RossD wrote: Unless prohibited by state law, you should be able to buy a car on Saturday and maybe even Sunday.

It's not prohibited, its inconvenient. Example: A dealer I spoke with yesterday is a bit over an hour away. They are open 9-6 M-F, 9-2 on Sat. Closed on Sunday. With those hours I would only be capable of looking at approximately 1 car a week.

Luckily I've made some progress with some of the larger dealers and they tend to have more reasonable hours - like 9am-8pm or so.

I bought my CPO 325i from a BMW dealer 2-1/2 hours away. I watched it sit on Autotrader for a month or two because it was a manual. Looked pretty good in pictures. When I got serious, I called them and started working with a salesdroid. He sent me couple of specific pictures I asked for. I made an offer of $24,000 against an asking price of about $26,000. He counteroffered at $24,200 which I took pending physical review of the car. They sent me a ton of paperwork to review detailing the car's history, CPO inspection report, etc. prior to signing.

I drove up with my nephew the next Saturday, test drove the car, got them to fix a couple minor issues while we waited, signed off, and drove it home. Painless and I got exactly the (used) car I wanted at a very fair price.

In 1999 I bought my '95 ACR from a private seller in Atlanta (14+ hours drive) via the Neon Mailing List, before the forums were big. Same deal: some emails and phone calls back and forth, some pictures as requested, and some trust. That one almost backfired through no real fault of the seller. It worked out in the end and he made good, but it did mean I had to fly to Atlanta twice instead of once. Coincidentally, my nephew went with me on that trip too and helped drive back.

You can try what I do. It works at least half the time for me.

Curtis: Hi, this is Curtis from Delaney Buick Honda. Hey, it looks like you have a Mazda 5, stock number [insert number from ad] retailed for $[money]. My wife is really interested in that car, just wondered what you had in it or what you could take for it.

Salesperson: I'll have to check, blah, blah

Curtis: No worries, check it out for me... so you get decent ups in [insert their town]? I always liked it down there and we don't get a lot of traffic here. We're working on 13 units this week, kinda dry. Thinking of getting my Zs.

Salesperson: Well, without telling you what we have in it, I know I can let it go for [inserts price].

In this case, I really AM Curtis from Delaney Buick Honda, or at least I was. If you let them know they have a pretty definite sale (and also know that you know how the business works) they usually cut to the chase and just make it a nice deal. That saves you haggling and wondering.

Last one I did in that way was my wife's 05 Scion xB. I was in Austin, the car was in Houston. Called the dealer on a $9800 car and he coughed up that they had a little over $7000 in it so he'd take $7500. He could have been lying, but the numbers sounded at least ballpark, and I had an almost 25% discount for a 10 minute conversation. I faxed him my driver's license and drove over the next day to buy it.

Funny quick story, too... I told him I would bring cash. I stopped at the bank to get cash and all they had was 20s. Poor F&I manager had to use that counterfeit pen on almost 400 individual bills. He was cursing me a lot.

Sorry to hear it's not working out for you. I definitely had my share of dealers who show little interest in selling out of state, maybe they had bad experiences before. You can root them out quickly, as they won't respond or are very disinterested in the responses they give. But there are plenty who will sell out of state and are all too happy to do so. Express interest right up front, explain what you're doing, explain that you're looking to buy NOW, etc...that should help.

I'm actually just about to pull the trigger on a car that's 800+ miles from here.