Have you tried carmax? They don't allow sales people out on the lot. All the cars are unlocked, so you can get inside, and you can get all the info about the car from their app. I bought my last 2 cars from carmax, and was a totally painless experience.
You pay a non insignificant amount more for this experience. Not that it isn't worth it to some people, you don't get a horrible price you're just guaranteed not a low price. True about the entire haggle free market though.
I likely don’t have the skills / patience necessary to get a better deal from a dealership anyway so just buying a car in my price range without the games works pretty well.
I pay not to have to deal with bullshit in a lot of areas of my life. Buying a car is the definition of “dealing with bullshit”. We have bought three of our last four cars from there and it always felt like a good experience.
We bought our son a 2010 Jeep Liberty from there in 2020. It constantly had little problems that they would fix without a hassle for the first few months.
Out of the blue, they called me and offered to reimburse me for one months payment on top of offering reimbursement on a car rental - they didn’t have to do either.
We ended up turning down the car rental since I was working remotely by then and I just let him use my car.
This. Car dealerships are some of the most unpleasant places I’ve ever been inside. Pushy, manipulative, sleazy… it drove us to buy our last vehicle on Kijiji
In a way, the hard to negotiate market makes things easier. It took me about 6 weeks to get a car that was "in transit" which actually meant it was "in the manufacturing pipeline." But, other than that, I spent maybe a few hours at the dealer on a couple visits, negotiated down some factory installed options by getting them added to a trade-in, mostly fended off some upsells... No it's not just click and buy on a website but for a big purchase, hard to call it horrible.
I've bought a few cars from dealers in recent years and honestly the experience was ok to fine. In every case I knew which vehicle I wanted to buy before contacting the dealer, so perhaps that makes a difference. Through the whole process where they try to make you buy warranties and so on, I just say "I feel lucky", and chuckle a bit. If they ask about another warranty, I repeat "I feel really lucky", again jovially. Nobody has tried to ask a third time.
There's also the fact that nobody ever brags about turning down all the dealer options like warranties and wheel protection and then actually gets bad curb rash or a $3500 bill for a timing belt replacement.
