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A recent email from the increasing inconsolable Buickman (a.k.a. Jim Dollinger) had me shaking my head in disbelief. Buickman listed all the discounts available at your local GM store: AARP, GM Discount, Recent College Grad, Active Military, Olds Owner, Father who was a UAW Retiree, Owned Import Took Overnight Test Drive, Incremental Allowance, Bonus Cash and Matching Down payment. Our own Frank Williams says The General's also offering up to three percent against vehicle purchase on GM's Flexible Earnings credit card, special financing offers ranging from 0% to 4.9% and up to $5000 cash back (depending on the model and trim level). Oh, and don't forget regional deals. NOW how much would you pay for that Chevy Silverado? Hell if I know.
18 Comments on “GM Discounts, Incentives, Confusion (Pt. 1)...”
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Its extremely confusing for the customer, prospective customer, sales person, dealer, and even the manufacturers. Dealing with all these rebates, programs, ads an additional layer of bureaucracy in the handling of transactions.
The majority of informed consumers wait for the last 2 weeks of the month, and better yet the last few days of the month to do a deal.
The calendar month goes from the 1 to 30 the sales month goes from the 10 to 40, no such thing as 40 days. Oh yes there is, RDR the car on the last day of the month and deliver the first week of the following month.
This is an interesting article
http://wardsdealer.com/ar/auto_lets_try_thinking/
Endless price confusion is an attempt to introduce variable pricing…in other words, a modern substitute for haggling. If I’m sufficiently interested in saving money to cut my way through the confusion, then GM will offer me a deal…up to the point where they might lose money on the deal. Anyway, it should work that way, rather than “lose more than dollars on the deal”. But if I’m insufficiently motivated to save money, or if the product being offered is sufficiently valuable to me, then I pay a higher price which reflects the product’s true value to me.
The possibility that I might get pissed off at someone who plays this game to a greater extent than their competition, and therefore avoid them like the plague, doesn’t seem to appear in most descriptions of the “theory” I’ve seen.
My above post contains: “lose more than dollars on the deal”, reflecting a bug in the posting software. It’s not escaping HTML tag definitoin characters such as the greater-than sign or less-than-sign that enclosed the letter “X” appearing between “than” and “dollars”. As in: lose more than <X> dollars.
ttilley: "…reflecting a bug in the posting software." NOW you tell me. Seriously, please report all bugs, snafus and misfires to robert.farago@thetruthaboutcars.com. Tx
I can’t wait for Ford to follow suit! They won’t stand for one single Edge/MKX sale to be lost to an Acadia/Lookout/WhatstheBuickversion sale.
As for the new blogging section, I think it will be interesting. I’m one of your readers who simply enjoys what you already offer, so if this blogging feature ends up not working, I’d bet that most of us won’t be too disappointed.
Well, I for one, am proud of GM. I figure that in the next decade there will be so many incentives, the GM dealer will paying me to take the chevy off the lot. That would probably get me to buy american. Though, they would have to pay me a substantial amount and not using mail-in rebates
Pay you to take it off the lot, yes, but then kill you with service charges when you come back. Sort of like Gillette with its razor handles and blades or cheap printers with their overpriced replacement ink cartridges ….
As for the expanded blogging opportunities, I’m sure they will be successful and will thus consume even more of your members’ time than they already do. In fact, with all the great stuff on TTAC (and elsewhere on the web, too, of course), it’s simply amazing that any of us ever find time to enjoy our cars at all.
The supreme irony in all this is that despite closing in on the $1,000 mark on my GM Visa discount card ( I signed up four years ago in a pique of ill-founded optimism), their entire stable of offerings leavesme cold.
So the dollars keep accumulating…..
Maybe GM will start donating cars to the Kidney Foundation, just to get the tax write-off…
One word: Ebay
Let the market truly decide.
if gm really made AMERICAN products that were RELIABLE and pleasing in materials and finish, they wouldn`t have to hook up new clients on swinging discounts in front of their eyes. People need REAL PRODUCTS and are ready to pay for them. PEOPLE DON`T need discounts. they need good cars. THey are ready to overpay just to forget about fixing malfunctions. how the damn you make money importing and rebadging other brand cars, sending profits to korea and japan and from the morsels you get ,you still have count out discount share. discounted products have discounted image of value…..
P.S. off the topic a bit–( by the way ,kodak is out of photo camera manufacturing. what a coincidence , whenever it deals with assembling parts together, the companies go out of business in usa. kodak will stamp chips for motorola.( using probably japanese robots). So you see the fault is not only in big 2.8whatever , but the engineering field of movements as such.) HOW MANY JAPANESE PRECISION MANUFACTURING COMPANIES HAVE PERISHED IN LAST 100 YEARS? RIGHT, NONE!!!!!!!dishwashers needed- 8.50$/hr.
My parents were able to purchase a new Buick LeSabre last year for about $17K due to all of the incentives and discounts they received. My father told me he almost felt guilty buying the car, not understanding how the car could be built for that price.
dishwashers needed- 8.50$/hr.
jurisb (and everyone else), you should The End of the Line about global outsourcing. It may sound off topic but they do discuss the auto industry frequently. And it does provide some interesting insights into the Big 2.8 blunders, er, decisions over the years.
Get your Prozac prescription filled first though.
It’s not just the domestics that play these pricing games. My in-laws managed to buy a Lexus ES for a price that would leave many Camry buyers angry and embarassed. Of course they are iron-fisted negotiators. Personally I don’t have the stomach for it, which is why I always buy used – in one of the great ironies of modern life pricing on used cars is far more transparent than on new cars.
The GM card is an interesting topic to cover…I get 5% of whatever I spend into an account for a GM car. Typically, a 2-3% of a transaction is paid to credit card issuers by merchants, as well as a transaction fee of 25 cents or so. Over the years of use of my card, was GMAC the benefactor of the 2-3%? HSBC is actually the bank that issued the card. So what is GM getting in return on the 5% of every transaction I make going to one of their cars?
I’ve amassed nearly $3500 on my GM card since I first got it about 5 years ago. Now I am at the point where the only vehicles where I can use my full GM Card discount on are the real dogs. The new Silverado and other decent vehicles only allow $1k of your GM Card discount to apply. No discounts for Saturn, either, which is a shame…my wife and I kind of like the Aura.
jurisb…your frequent posts on the American flight from engineering depress me, though I agree with and am aware of most of your points. Americans still do engineer some high-tech, high expense items…satellites, rockets, military technology, etc. But most consumer products are no longer engineered by Americans. Even the Big 2.8 only engineer their full-size truck products, and a few spare vehicles (Corvette) in the states nowadays. I think it’s great that GM is doing most Volt engineering in the US…hopefully that vehicle actually comes to market someday. My question to you, jurisb–obviously a European (Latvia?)–, is whether the same is happening in Europe, also. Of course BMW/Porsche/Daimler still engineer their vehicles in Germany, but besides those few examples, are the Europeans outsourcing engineering to the Asians for the majority of their consumer products as well? I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they are…or will be doing moreso, in the near future.
I have had a GM Visa Card for nearly a decade. My plan was to buy an inexpensive (???) small new car for my kids to use. Essentially a throw away – but hopefully good enough for 3 – 5 years to get us through the experience. At the time, the Suzuki based car Chevy was selling (I forget the name now) was listing for less than $10G. So with my $3500 (that was their offer at the time)I was looking at $6500 or so. Not bad. Even for a crap car – if it was on warranty – I could deal with it.
By the time I got enough points to do a deal – just at that point, GM both dropped the product line and changed the redemption deal from a $3500 discount on all cars to a variable amount depending on the car. The cheapest car in their line-up was over $13000 and I felt cheated. Still do. Add product quality and design to the mix – so long GM.
The original GM MasterCard issued originally in the early 90s still yields 5% discount on most GM cars, with no cap on earned amount. $3500 means $3500.
About 5 years ago GM came out with a new card with caps on models, and slammed many legacy cardholders with promises of a card ‘upgrade.’