Pandemic-Era Car Buying
Plus, a helping hand from our auto consigliere, Paulo
It’s hard to say whether buying a car during a pandemic-induced supply shortage or buying one online is the more challenging scenario. What’s certain is that purchasing a slightly used automobile in the midst of a crisis and from a dealer on the other side of the continent makes for an extremely challenging combination.
A few weeks after I agreed to buy this car, it looks set to arrive later today at a local dealership. The dealer will examine the car to make sure it’s in the tip-top shape the selling dealership claims. Once it gets the all clear, and after I get it registered and titled, it’s all ours.
It took a lot of patience, hours upon hours of phone calls and much research online to get to this point. I’m glad this consumer odyssey is almost in the rear-view mirror.
A confluence of factors made this a financially opportune time to update my family’s hybrid/electric vehicle. The factors making for a major shortage in cars for sale has vastly inflated the value of our car. Though replacing it with something a little bit newer wasn’t cheap, because of the price we could get for the old one, it was much more affordable than normal. I recently blogged here about the process of selling our car to Carvana. (See the left of this for an excerpt from that earlier post.)
My bottom line recommendation for car-buying is that the more work you put into it, the better deal you’ll get. It takes persistence — and probably some luck.
Homework
If you want a good deal on a car that you like, you will need to spend a lot of time doing research and talking to people who are in the know.
You can’t rely on a single dealer, a single wholesaler, a single manufacturer or even a single online marketplace. I think you still can get an OK deal by one-stop shopping. It’s just that the market is so fragmented now and the latest information on automobiles is so defuse that you won’t get something great without putting in a lot of legwork.
For us, this meant looking at every major used car digital marketplace. I started with Carvana, and I found them to be pretty easy to use. I was initially able to get a lot of answers by talking to a customer service representative by phone. But for our particular car, they didn’t end up having the best deal.
Making this all possible was the advice and confidence boost I got from our automobile consigliere, Paulo at Auto Centro in Rockville, Maryland. He figuratively held my hand throughout this process, and as a bonus assisted me in getting in marketable shape the 2015 Chevy Volt that I just sold this past weekend.
Paulo tried to get our family a deal as good as the one he got for us back in 2016 on this EV. It’s just that the market dynamics are so screwy now that wholesale prices were actually higher than those at third-party auto sellers.
Just by doing a web search for 2019 Chevrolet Volt, I found the best deal on Carfax. This in turn led me to an auto dealer in California that was selling this car, which was returned to it after a lease ended.
Having Paulo on our side was key. He helped to advise us on purchasing from the Rydells dealership in Northridge, California, the car that I found on Carfax. He took a look at the online profile of this and other cars that I found on various marketplaces, and said that this was likely to be the best car in terms of condition and price. He spoke to the dealer with me to make sure that the car was really in the condition it was advertised as being in.
Carvana
Carvana, where we just sold our car, was not quite as easy as our experiences with Paulo.
The benefit of Carvana is that they had consistently higher prices. The downside is that their process was cumbersome and took ages — hours of speaking with them, of chatting, of texting.
They wanted lots of photographs and documentation. In my opinion, this could be short-circuited by having a human appraiser show up in person and provide an estimate for the car’s value. Technology wasn’t much of a match for a human being.
Old-School
In buying a car from Carfax, I still had to go through the dealer who was actually selling the car. The process was anything but straightforward.
So much of car transactions are old-fashioned, I found. You need to exchange physical paperwork — nothing electronically. You need to transfer money as if you’re buying it in person — no easy-peasey money transfers like when you pay an online bill. That necessitates getting a bank involved, and transaction fees to boot.
Another difficulty is that we were buying a car in one state and having it transported to another. This basically means that there was no one business that could help us get the car registered, titled and a temporary tag and/or permanent license plate. Neither the dealer that’s selling us the car nor the dealer that I arranged to receive physical shipment of the car, wanted to take this on. Some more legwork ensued, asking various government offices what I should do.
Oh, and don’t forget that unless you want to fly out to the West Coast, and drive the car back home, you’ll need to arrange for transport. Here again, you’ll encounter shipping bottlenecks due to bad weather and pandemic-induced logistical issues.
The car wasn’t picked up by the shipping carrier for a week-plus. On the other hand, the price for shipping was pretty reasonable at around $1,000. And once it was picked up, the third-party carrier (contracting with the company we actually used) only took a few days to drop it off.
Chevrolet
And let’s not forget the challenge of getting any shred of information out of Chevy and its corporate owner, General Motors. Because the Volt was discontinued back in 2019, dealers I checked with neither had any inventory nor any information on the car’s specifications and other technical details.
This meant turning to Chevy/GM for answers. The information was hard-won, I found.
I had a few basic questions that I figured the automaker should be able to easily answer: What’s the estimated EV range of the 2019 models and what are some other specs like dimensions.
Probably because these are not being made anymore, I don’t think the company had any readily-available answers. The manuals I was directed to were no help, for they don’t list specs. Nor were other materials associated with the year/model.
In the end, I was told (incredibly) that Chevy doesn’t know how many miles a typical 2019 Volt can get on its battery. So again, I turned to third-party websites, and got the answers I needed. After persisting for a week-plus, I also got the dimensions from Chevy.
Chevy didn’t make it easy. Their chat/email function on their website was inoperable. They didn’t quickly respond to my tweet and my direct messages over Twitter, although I did eventually get some details. And they either didn’t pick up their phones, didn’t return my calls or seemed to simply give up trying to help.
On the plus side, I’m a big fan of Chevy’s EVs.
For the past five years, we have been the satisfied owners of a 2015 Volt. We bought it wholesale from Paulo when it was about a year old, and it had 5,000 miles. It now has about 38,000 miles. No one looking at it would be fooled into thinking it’s in great condition.
Chevrolet and General Motors in my opinion were the weak link in this entire process. It was like pulling teeth to get the most basic information out of them, so that I could compare the specifications on our current car to the most recent model year.
The auto dealer who I bought the 2019 Volt from didn’t make the transaction a piece of cake. I found that I had to be really persistent to just get them to sell the car to me. And paying was a huge hassle. Not to mention getting the paperwork from them and returning it.
The salesperson I dealt with wasn’t always helpful, either. He did in fairness inform me that the car’s color was not the silver that it appeared to be in the online ad on Carfax. It was actually green-ish. I appreciated that he took some photos of the car, because the tint in his pictures was quite different from what was on the website.
The whole sale almost broke down over about $25. After I got a bottom-line price of $25,000 (and a few dollars) from the salesman, I didn’t want to pay any additional fees.
When he said I’d need to pay another $25, I nearly walked away from the sale. And he was going to lose the sale over this small discrepancy.
Fortunately, someone else at the dealership interceded, and it all worked out. It turned out that because we weren’t planning on driving the car in California, we didn’t need to pay the fee after all.
But cross my fingers (and toes), I’m glad that the whole experience seems to be working out. It will be nice to have a slightly newer car, all for what I consider to be an incredible deal.
