We bought a 2008 Honda Civic EX (5-speed Auto) in Durham recently and I thought others might be interested in the numbers. We wanted to trade in our 2005 Kia Spectra 5 for something safer and more economical. We orginally thought about used Hondas, but the price difference between a new Civic and a 2 year old Civic was pretty minimal especially considering the warranty.

We did a lot of online shopping with the usual suspects including Edmonds.com, Yahoo Autos, and Consumer Reports. We also got quotes from the car buying services at the North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union and USAA. We got internet quotes from local 4 local dealerships including Leith Honda and Crown Honda.

NCSECU Car Buying Service actually got us the lowest price, but we didn’t buy with them. Car buying services rock, though. Call them up, tell them what you want, they call the regional sales office for the best price, and call you back. They’ll even pick it up and deliver it to you. The USAA Car Buying Service just sent us an email to take to the dealership instructing them to give us $300 above invoice.

We ended up buying from Leith Honda. We did all of the negotiating via email. I negotiated Crown Honda down, sent that information to Leith, they offered to beat it, I sent that back to Crown, Crown declined to negotiate further. No sales people!

Here’s the information our credit union provided us with about the cost of the car from chromecarbook.com:

Information from USAA:

Crown told us the MSRP was $20,145. They also added mudflaps for $199. They offered us the car for $19,293 and offered us $5,500 for our Kia. Ouch!
According to Consumer Reports, a good price to aim for is 4% to 8% above dealer their bottom line price, which is Dealer Invoice Price minus Dealer Incentives and Dealer Holdback. Here’s their information:

We ended up buying the car from Leith for $18,455 and getting $6,500 for our car. We got the promoted 2.9% interest rate, which is nice. We also paid the Documentation Fee of $398 and Sales Tax of $358.65.
We love the car and feel like we got a decent deal. Unfortunately, while we were at Leith closing the deal, our salesman from Crown called me and browbeat me on the phone. He yelled that we had a deal and how could I do that to him. I’ll never go there for service even though it’s closer to our house. No thanks.
Really, though, the car is fantastic. It’s much, much quicker than the Kia, more comfortable, quieter, and more economical. We get about 32 MPG city/highway (hard to differentiate since we drive both equally each week). The entire cockpit becomes an airbag and it has 4 wheel disk brakes. I wish it had traction control, but that’s life. It’s a great car and, although I couldn’t care less about cars, I’ve always wanted a Honda.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Brandi, Meta, Play. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.