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That’s not real. It can’t be.
You can see the photographer’s reflection. Oh wait, that’s a $50,000 price tag on a Pontiac.
Not pictured: The wheelbarrow the dealer uses to hold his gigantic balls.
Silly GMC/Pontiac/Buick dealer, you’re supposed to subtract the rebate from the price, not add it on to it!
It just shows how out of touch dealers are. My boss went out looking at new cars a couple of weeks ago and said that nobody’s dealing. He decided to just stick with his 8 year old Taurus, I’ll just keep my 7 year old Malibu. No payments and no problems.
All caps except for using lower case i?
Here is this car on eBay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Pontiac-G8-GXP-GXP-6-spd-man-all-options-LS3-415-hp-Brembo-brakes_W0QQitemZ160314467885QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUS_Cars_Trucks?hash=item160314467885&_trksid=p4506.c0.m245&_trkparms=65%3A3|39%3A1|240%3A1318
Every dealer of every brand does this when they get a hot car, I have no problem with it. Usually dealers have to go below MSRP, sometimes they can go above. Hopefully we aren’t subsidizing this guys floor plan interest rate while he sits on this car though.
In a couple of weeks there will be a minus sign in front of that ten large, itemized as “Liquidation Sale.”
Could ya scream: “Put us into receivership” any louder?
Did they learn nothing from what Dodge dealers did to the Challenger?
Easy on this dealer – it may be the last car he ever sells, so the money has to last awhile.
And everyone wonders why the Japaneese are eating GM’s lunch. Summer 06, I went shopping for an 07 Honda Fit. Car had been out about 3 months, then gas spiked. Nobody had any in stock. We managed to find a dealer that kept one for test drives. We ordered the car and had to wait 5 months for it to arrive. Paid list. No markups, no mandatory “dealer added equipment” packages. Just MSRP and destination and sales tax. That Honda dealer could have added a thousand or two and who knows, I may still have bought the car. But now I am a customer who feels treated fairly and who appreciates it. Guess who gets the first crack next time I go car shopping.
Your tax dollars at work.
moedaman,
How true. My stepfather just received the same treatment helping his daughter shop for a new car. Shopping in the Dallas area, they were looking for small sedan or hatchbacks from VW, Mazda, Nissan and Mini. Everywhere they went, no deals. I’m not sure if the dealers are out of touch, or they can’t afford to sell for less. Whatever it is, it sure seems weird in this climate.
In my own experience, Honda of McKinney still has outragous second stickers on their windows that include $400 wheel locks, paint sealant (they still do that?), cargo covers, (and my favorite) nitrogen filled tires! In a FIT!!!! They had Fits (non sports) priced out well over $21K. Crazy.
Nothing. That, sir, is what you call comedy.
Quote from the ebay listing:
” As it’s limited in availability, we want a lot of people to be able to see it. We already had people offering to pay sticker ($41,590) but it would have been gone the first day and there are so few of them we want all the people that have been eagerly awaiting it to be able to come down and check it out in person.”
Yes, out of the goodness of their hearts and the betterment of mankind, and the starving kids in Japan, they held of selling the car at sticker so more people could ‘check it out’. I’m sure ‘check it out’ doesn’t equate to a test drive.
If this sells at that price I will be pissed as it will prove conclusively that Assholes buy Pontiacs and convince me not to enter one of their showrooms for fear of being recognized.
I never though from the beginning that any G8 had a future but to delibretly repeat what the same dealers did to quickly kill the GTO is beyond lunacy.
Why buy from a company that obviously hates its customers that much?
Perhaps Mr. Lutz can answer that question for us.
–chuck
Photochop ! Those numbers just don’t look “right”.
Not sure I agree that dealers aren’t dealing. I just got a 2009 Mazdaspeed3 for 1000 under invoice. I’ll grant you, the Mazda 3 is about to be replaced, but I thought that was an OK deal.
allythom,
Just curious, what’s the invoice?
I saw something quite similar on a G8 GT mid-December in front of a local Costco, where they try to convince shoppers to buy cars through Costco’s car buying program. The G8 had a markup of almost $2K before the red tag discount. But this markup was clever; the dealer stated it was for “Dealer cost of vehicle storage, insurance, delivery, and General Motors marketing group.” You betcha.
As far as the $10K markup goes, the dealer should realize that the “limited availability” will probably still put more GXPs on the ground than needed to match the real-world limited demand for the car.
This is the attitude that has been the norm in dealers and throughout the US automotive industry. Didn’t they do the same thing with the GTO? As Yogi said”It’s dejavue all over again” This is why they are where they are!
How else is GM supposed to pay back government loans? They’re not making it up in volume, for sure.
I suggest that if they don’t want to sell it for X number of days so that everyone can come in and see it, then to instead say, “This car will not be available for sale until such date, and we’ll have a drawing for who gets to buy it (at MSRP).” Wouldn’t that make better PR?! As it would turn me off to see a dealer saying that their out to rape someone.
@ Airhen,
That type of creativity and thought from a marketing perspective has been absent from GM and it’s dealers for, well, forever.
Heh. Everybody is a free-marketeer when opposing the bailout bucks, but when a dealer tries to take advantage of the same free market to get as much for a car as he can, we collectively shit on him.
If he succeeds in selling the GXP for $51k and pocketing 10 large on the deal then it will no doubt work out for him.
The problem is that $51k takes you into a market niche with some pretty damn good cars, available from car manufacturers not in immediate danger of going tango uniform.
Straight-line acceleration just barely better than a BMW 335i, but at the cost of an M3.
Jack Harrison is still in business? I (well, my Dad) bought a ’74 Fiat 128 from them in ’78. $2K. Fun little car.
red5:
MS3 GT Invoice: $23781. Includes Delivery. MSRP was $25400 IIRC.
If that won’t sell all the G8 GTs on the lot, nothing will.
All the car sites are in agreement that the GXP isn’t worth the extra cash, and what do you do? Add $10K more. I think that explains why GM got into the hole in the first place.
just watch. it’ll still be there in 30 days (or however many) when the bank loan comes due, and they’ll take $10K UNDER MSRP.
this guy represents everything wrong with domestic auto dealers.
The problem? The G8 is for sale.
Hey Sigsworth: I owned a ’74 Fiat 128SL in 1982. It was a wonderful, hateful car. My next Fiat will be a 500 when it arrives Stateside.
A friend of mine went to a local Pontiac dealer to drive a GXP, and was told it was not going to be produced. Apparently said dealer had none in stock….
allythom
Interesting. I WAS in the market for a slightly used MS3 and found a 2008 one in the next county for $16987 with 17k miles. Dealer would not budge even though I offered $15k plus $1000 cash.
Ended up getting a 2006 Mazda 6s with 25k miles on the odo. Here’s the kicker: it has the V6/5 speed manual combo.
*Heaven*
Managed to knock $3000 off the dealer’s asking price so I still feel good.
Hey, if he can get that much, what’s the problem? Welcome to capitalism.
Of course, he probably won’t, in which case, welcome to capitalism.
Overheard in the sales manager’s office: “Somewhere out there is a sucker who’ll fall for this. Hehe”.
Hope springs eternal in the auto dealer’s breast…
Being a free market proponent means that I won’t try to make a law against dealers shooting themselves in the foot like this.
Doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to say they are stupid douchebags for doing this.
WTF? Toyota dealers never did this with the Prius! TIC
It’s funny. Laugh and walk away.
Screw that.
I really like the G8, and I would love to own a GXP.
BUT, I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever pay dealer markup.
It just doesn’t make sense from the consumers point view.
The really funny thing is that you can go online and find a lot of used G8 GTs with very low miles in the low 20s range. Only problem is that none of the GTs have a stick (damn you GM). The GXP is a better car but it’s not worth spending an extra 25 or so thousand dollars (including dealer markup) versus a barely used G8 GT.
Are there any dealer networks that are prohibited from doing this?
“Team, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that were are charging $10,000 over sticker for the new GXP! HuzzaaH!!!!!! The bad news is we can’t sell them for cost!”
A dealer can dream.
More likely: they hope to use the GXP to draw in potential customers, then switch them to a GT.
jpcavanaugh :
“Easy on this dealer – it may be the last car he ever sells, so the money has to last awhile“.
Let me just say, dealers where I am, were doing this b4 we entered into this economy. The G8’s sat for a long time and then the mark up’s began to disappear. Right now, with incentives this car is about, 35,295.
Why buy from a company that obviously hates its customers that much?
Perhaps Mr. Lutz can answer that question for us.
Look, you can blame Lutz for a lot of things. But you can’t blame him for the fact that state franchising laws prevent GM from preventing dealers from jacking up the price. You could blame your state legislators. You could blame your state’s voters who elected those legislators. You could blame the idiot dealers. But you can’t blame Lutz.
As for the dealer, he’s simply smoking crack. If he’s lucky, he’ll sell the car for MSRP before he goes bankrupt in the next six months.
jgh beat me to it – where is the minus sign in front of the $10,000?
Do these dealers never learn?
We got one of these.
I had to take 12 G3’s for it, and an Aztek never titled.
There are three guys in the County who really want this car.
One will pay the overage.
I saw this recently on a Mugen CRX at a local Honda dealer. He only wanted $8500.00 over sticker.
The problem with this photo is they forgot to write the Lira symbol before all those numbers right there.
₤
“We got one of these. I had to take 12 G3’s for it, and an Aztek never titled.”
In some industries that kind of bundling is considered illegal. I guess that explains why a dealer would try for $10k over sticker on a GXP … because they are likely to loose that much sitting on the G3s and an Aztek.
Limited availability, eh?
Just imagine the premium that will apply to all Pontiacs a year from now.
For those out looking for “Deals” – ditto. My in laws just bought a Camry, cross shopped a lot of stuff in that range, and there were no real deals to be found. Everything was around MSRP. In looking through car ads the deals I’m seeing are leftover 08 and 07 models still sitting on lots, and late-model used cars (e.g. you can get fully loaded Fusions and Milans with about 20-30K miles for dirt).
It’s real. It was posted on the LSX forum I moderate.
Dealers (of all brands) have been doing this for a very long time and markup is basically expected. Most people wait until the early adopters get their fill, the markups go away and discounts begin.
Say no to crack.
speedlaw,
I’ve seen the same at the Honda dealer near me. With all the add ons they were trying to move a Mugen for almost $35K! The same one is still there, although now it’s parked outside.
The arrogance of these dealers amazes me. It seems that all of these limited availability cars suffer the same fate. Let’s see- we have the recent 15k mark-ups on Challengers and the Charger Superbee. Before that there were 55k SSR’s, and 75k Thunderbirds; all of them “collector cars”. Where are they now? Waiting for a 2035 garage find…?
Maybe they should just sell the damn things for sticker, get them on the street and keep customers happy. Nothing pisses me off more than a Dodge/GM/Ford dealer that is “doing you a favor”.
(I’m pretty sure the new V8 M3 was in high demand when it came out but it sold for sticker and I was able to take a test drive. Ditto the RS4, 911 Turbo, AM Vantage….)
End rant.
speedlaw :
February 11th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
We got one of these.
I had to take 12 G3’s for it, and an Aztek never titled.
I can’t tell if you are joking or not. If you are, brillant trolling! A++++ will fall for troll bait again! If not, holy fucking shit.
I’d pay 35K for a GXP. The G8 has been a total failure. What arrogance.
I went to look at Mustangs when the 2005 model came out. Our local dealer had one I liked, but it had a “Dealer Markup” of $4,000 (at least he called a spade a spade). I told them I would not pay a cent over invoice. We chatted a couple of minutes more and I concluded they were serious so I left.
I never bought a Mustang at all!
Yeah, 35k seems like a nice price. 50k? No thanks. As for the Charger Super Bee, it looks like a freakin taxi cab. What a joke.
Hey Robert, speeka’ inglish plizz?
“What‘s wrong with this …”
I thought you hired someone to catch these things. It looks like you don’t pay him/her enough .:)
Why stop at $10K? Why not go to $15K or $20K?
The Photographer is in the picture.
What Wrong with this Picture caption: as incitatus said.
Is this a S. Calif. markup? I’d suspect more there, as PT Cruisers and Acura RDX’s first appearing in S. Calif were marked up $10K or more (people bought them anyway).
Dealers are jerkoffs. And assholes who pay over MSRP for anything are the reason dealers do this in the first place…….you should never take Viagara before going out to look at cars. Instead take Saltpeter.
I would love to be in this guys showroom when he gets notification that GM has declared bankruptcy.
How come they can wrap themselves in the laws of supply and demand when an item is hot, but when the item is not, and they are overflowing in stock, they deny it? Obviously their complementary solution for oversupply must then be to cut price until it sells. How come they’re not doing that with their G6s and G5s?
This lends itself to Monty Python-esque humor:
“Limited Availability? There’s 20 of ’em sitting in your yard.”
“Where sir? I don’t see any sir.”
“Right in front of us!”
“Oh them, they’ve only been there for a couple of days sir, sold them all straight away sir.”
“But there’s weeds growing round them!”
“Weeds? Oh you mean the confetti sir. Those are just decorations sir.”
If you get even 1 sucker…..
Don’t think this is domestic. Hell, I worked at a VW dealer in 2000 as a summer job tidying the lot, washing the cars, pulling the plastic on new arrivals, etc. When new cars arrived 1) pull all the plastic and wash it 2) add the dealer markup sticker. $1000 for 2.SLOW cars and $2000 for 1.8T and VR6 models. Every single car on the lot had these stickers. Mugen Civic is another. Um, Mazdaspeed3. I’ve even seen it as recently as 6-8 months ago on Miatas. Prius for years. Challenger. Um, what else…. VW Beetle. MINI Coopers for pretty much the entire 1st generation car.
Think of it as a sucker sticker that only works on a few suckers and only when a car is brand new. You sell it for even $5k over sticker you just made how much on one sale? Better than the $150 you’d make normally (or whatever puny number it actually is).
Should they actually do it is another debate? Personally, it pretty much causes me to never want to go to a dealership again. But that’s not my business. Takes your chances. But be ready to live with your decision.
Some dealers put these markup stickers on every car as a regular business practice. Somehow they manage to make it work by negotiating from the inflated price down, with the goal of only going down to MSRP.
I see nothing wrong with putting these stickers on hot cars when they first come out. It’s no different than Verizon charging $500 for the Razr when it first came out, and now the same phone is free. If someone wants the car bad enough to pay extra, good for them. It’s not the deal you got, it’s the deal you THINK you got.
Your friends may think you’re cool for getting one of the first GXPs until they find out how much you paid for it…
I went to the dealership this last weekend and they had a $2k “Market adjustment”. When I asked, the “sales and leasing consultant” said that it was because it was a limited production car.
Do dealerships make the market adjustment up as they see fit?
Oh, and at $44k, there’s no GPS option. Period.
Now I know the reason why they only sold 14,000 G8s in 2008.
excrement……….
Pontiacs are what blue collar housewives drive. What blue collar housewife would pay 41K?
I agree that it is capitalism at work.
Likely scenario: Nobody will pay a $10k premium for a slow-selling car in a bad economy from a bankrupt company. So that car will sit for 3 months, and the $10k will become a discount – before all the other incentives.
And then someone will walk away paying $28k for this car.
Happy_Endings: “Why stop at $10K? Why not go to $15K or $20K?”My favorite ‘Adjusted Market Value’ story is still the final year production Plymouth Prowler ‘Woodward Edition’ (nothing more than two-tone black/red paint) I saw in a dealer showroom with a markup of $100,000 over MSRP. When I saw it, I actually thought the ADM sticker was a joke that someone had slipped onto the glass next to the Monroney sticker. But then a salesman confirmed they actually expected to get $100k over MSRP for a car that had long since lost its appeal years ago.
Needless to say, that particular red and black Plymouth Prowler sat there for a long, long time…
That’s nothing. There’s a dealership that has a $30K markup on a Corvette C6 Z06.
The GTO died not because of looks (yeah, it was a little plain), but because of crap like this.
Apparently, dealers still assume that the average person who is interested in this car will do absolutely anything to get their hands on one. This includes the boomer who didn’t have the money to buy into the muscle car era when it was live and kicking, but wants to buy into its resurrection now. These guys have (or had) good incomes and to dealers, they were literally full wallets walking around waiting to be plucked clean.
But most buyers have common sense. Common sense dictates a $70,000 soft boulevarder with mediocre performance collecting dust on the showroom floor. Common sense dictates the same Z06 with the $30k markup to sit their for a year and a half until it ends up being shoved out the door minus $40-$50k. Common sense dictates the person looking at the G8 GXP to note the sticker, note the markup, note the craptastic attitude of the salesperson and the unwillingness to negotiate a slightly more reasonable price, note that for $50k, he might as well buck up, add another $15k on the pile and go hunt for a RS4 or a M5 or some other car with a lot more cache…..and simply walk away. It’s happened a lot. It’ll happen again and again.
Eventually, you’ll take a glance over at the Pontiac dealership and see the G8 GXP sitting outside in front with a big ol’ sign saying $10k or $15k off MSRP. Of course by then, the G8 will be history, replaced with yet another FWD W-body replacement for the car that they never should have gotten rid of in the first place: The Grand Prix. For all it’s faults, it was easy to make money off of it because it was relatively easy to build and represented a relatively cheap compromise car to those who wanted a throaty beast with a little grunt but wanted the psychological safe harbor of a mediocre (by most standards) FWD platform, without paying an arm and a leg.
This dealer still rings the bell, with every car sold. It’s a very dusty bell.
That the GXP isn’t the vaporware this earlier article:
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/in-search-of-the-pontiac-g8-gxp/
would have you believe?
What’s wrong with it is, pictures usually say a thousand words? This one in particular says 1… GREED.
TTAC-ers, this is one of the best “proof” of why the US (and the rest of the world) is in recession.
Jared: Look, you can blame Lutz for a lot of things. But you can’t blame him for the fact that state franchising laws prevent GM from preventing dealers from jacking up the price. You could blame your state legislators. You could blame your state’s voters who elected those legislators. You could blame the idiot dealers. But you can’t blame Lutz
I wasn’t really “blaming” Lutz. so much as pointing out to him WHY customers are abandoning GM in droves. He wants to blame the American consumer for his employer’s problems. In reality GM, and their entire distribution channel is horrifically broken. We don’t hate our industry, but it sure feels like the Industry hates us… as illustrated by this example so very well.
–chuck
Call it capitalism but b/c it is a free country I’d take one look at that sticker and walk back out the door ’cause I can. I don’t like to deal with people who would take advantage of me. Oh wait, that’s why I haven’t dealt with a dealer but once in my lifetime – instead buying used cars from private owners.
It’s also the reason that I do like the Saturn concept so much. A fair price for a fair piece of machinery and my deal is no better or worse than the guy before me or the guy after me.
I’m not getting sized up “for what the market will bear” i.e. if they think they can screw me they will. Now this might be the way cars have been sold all over America for the past 75 years but it doesn’t make it the right way to sell cars. Just shows that dealers can’t break away from the mold or be creative about how they sell their product. If they can sock it to ya they will.
I have long wanted a dealer that had rasonable prices to buy or sell a vehicle with OEM parts at reasonable prices. I fear they don’t exist anywhere. I already know there is a 100%+ markup on parts from the manufacturer to me across the counter. A friend who worked for a VW/BMW dealer said that there was much more than that – more like a markup between departments within the same dealership… Pathetic.
No wonder I cruise the web looking for OEM parts wholesalers. Can’t deal with anyone local.
And the fwd Grand Prix? My grandparents had one. It was a good car (reliable) but to me a real snoozer in styling and function. It was exactly like my mother and brother-in-law’s Luminas with a wilder dash and slightly stiffer suspension. It did handle better than the average person needed a commuter car to of course. My grandparents got a decade of good use from it and moved on to a Lumina. I was neither attracted nor repulsed by the Grand Prix. I had a hard, hard time figuring out why it was named after a famous racetrack though. Nothing about it said racetrack. I guess a person could drive it to a racetrack and sit in the stands and watch the fast cars go… VBG!
@ jpcavanaugh:
I had the same experience when I ordered my Audi TT 225 Roadster in 2000. There were none to be had, only 1 to drive. I ordered it in October 2000. It was delivered in February of 2001. It was $500 under invoice.
Well, the news has just broke that the G8 GXP indeed had incentives piled on its hood to drop its price to 36K.
http://wot.motortrend.com/6467993/dealers/fast-is-cheap-incentives-drop-g8-gxp-to-36310-charger-srt8-to-34516/index.html
Anyone thinking irony?