[ZTWsquared]

sunny,Oct 19 2008, 01:50 PM Wrote:The car is a lease return and was serviced at the same dealership .. I will look at the service records on Monday when I go back .. We get free oil changes for 5 years .. I could tell the salesman was trying to play the "what monthly payments are you looking at" game .. I said I wanna talk about the price of the car and then finance ..
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Excellent job not getting pulled into the payments game.

With respect to the oil changes you should try and revert that into a dollar value too.

Two ways to do that ... ask them what interval they will do them at (funny how the interval changes from 5k to the book value when the dealership pays for them) ... then do the math for how many oil changes they will likely do for you in that 5 years ... and make sure you don't have to pay anything out of pocket like environmental or disposal fees or the taxes. Multiply the number of oil changes times what you would normally pay - don't let them tell you that an oil change is worth the 60 to 70 bucks they probably charge there at the dealership (unless they are prepared to discount the car by that much if taking the oil changes off the table).

The second way is to simply ask how much they would take off the car if you didn't want the oil changes (ie: what if you were planning on moving out of the area) ... this is probably a more accurate way of determining the true value of the oil changes.

One strategy might be to negotiate the price of the car without the oil changes ... then as your final act, once you've got them to the best price you can, ask them to put the oil changes back into the deal.