FROM A FORMER CAR FLEET MANAGER:
I know this isn’t how all dealers do it, but the extras and accessories (wheel locks, LoJack, paint and interior protection, VIN Etching, tint...) are always negotiable, or removable—physically or monetarily.
The retail dealer always makes money on the sale, regardless of the add ons and warranties. Those are just icing. The manufacturers give silent incentives, even reimbursing the dealer for interest charges (dealers usually don’t pay cash for cars themselves) and many back end kickbacks that change month-to-month. These amounts can be $300, to $10,000 depending on the vehicle and circumstances. The manufacturer will always look out for a good dealer. Also, customer service/satisfaction has become a key ‘commission’ payment direct from the manufacturers themselves for salespeople. My how it’s changed! For the better I’d say.
Back to the accessories-These accessories can be major profit centers for dealers, but truth be told, a good dealer will let these go for free if the deal requires it, because they never paid ‘cost’ for them to begin with. BUYER TIP: If the dealers say they can’t remove it, just take the deal sheet and leave the accessories on there, but deduct the accessories price from the vehicle price instead. Sometimes they’ll say ‘I’ll do it at cost’ which is a joke. *Full disclosure: don’t let this get in the way of a deal though, if you have to pay say $80 for the $400 window tint, or $50 for the $200 wheel locks, just do it.
The LoJack (there are many names) recovery GPS things are added to most new cars, or dealers will simply add them to every car. They have deals with the vendors to get the physical GPS (it’s basically a cell phone without a screen) for free and the vendor installs them all. It’s quick too, mostly they plug them into a power plug made for some uninstalled feature (like the seat heaters—your car didn’t come with seat heaters but the wiring harness for all this vehicles has an unused plug under your seat). If someone pays for it, they activate the tracker and the dealer gets a kickback from the vendor. These no-name GPS trackers are super cheapo too, $10 printed circuit boards where any good car thief will rip out and toss out the window as they speed away in your whip. If you feel you need one in your Ferrari, then buy the car and have a genuine LoJack installed later.
Same is true for ‘paint and cloth protection/underbody seal’. They spray (and mostly it washes off quickly) it on every car and the vendor will pay the dealer if they sell it, but the dealer just has buckets of the ‘spray’. VIN etching? Same thing too, all of those dealer’s new cars are ‘etched’, whether people end up paying for it or not.
Our fleet vehicles were always delivered thru dealers (manufacturers rules) and these vehicles didn’t get the accessories installed, but sometimes they forgot.
I remember years ago I added a subwoofer to my wife’s Honda Fit and was wiring the power to the wiring loom under the passenger seat (Unused seat warmer
and discovered the cheapo GPS tracker (it’ll have a sticker with an IMEI# like your cell phone) zip tied there. It’s just sitting there, and I almost guarantee one is in your car too-along with another for your wife to check on you
Before GPS they’d sell us on security systems, and I remember my 1994 Toyota had this strange electrical problem and I took the center console apart and found the old-school, poorly-wired, Chinese RF security system that I remembered they tried to sell me, I said no way, and they ‘said’ they’d remove it. They never did and it sat there for the 23 years I owned the truck. They just never gave me the key-ring remote for the security system, that’s what they do folks.
Another secret on used vehicles: It’s been a decade, but I orbited in bulk vehicle purchasing for a large fleet company for years and you’d be shocked at how cheap companies like lease and rental companies get brand-new cars. In most cases these former leases and rentals are the ‘Certified Pre-Owned’ or dealership used cars or CarMax cars. You may be driving an old rental car, and not know it, but honestly with today’s vehicle reliability they’re actually not bad deals or automatically assumed to be abused. If we had a smashed/totaled, any front-end impact or abused vehicle, it’d get auctioned, not sold to a reputable dealer. Believe it or not, CarMax and most dealers only want the best cars.
I’ll just say one example, and these are numbers I still remember verbatim: It’s June 2013 and we get next year’s model 2004 Corolla LE. MSRP was $15,300. We paid Fleet price, which was $8900! You heard me right. We’d lease or rent it for a year, pull it with 15-30k miles (before factory warranty ran out) and sell it to a used car lot or major name dealer for $10-$11k. Remember, it’s still a 2004 model, just with higher mileage in summer/fall 2004, so it’s very attractive for dealers to do this. That $1-2k was effectively our only profit. BTW, rental/lease make money on the end sale, That price you’re paying for that convertible rental in Hawaii—that just pays for the depreciation, so don’t feel bad. Yes, they make a little on prepaid gas and the ‘insurance’ damage waiver, but not much so don’t feel bad.
So just remember, seeing these used 2018, or even 2019 vehicles* on a dealer lot—think of me? Don’t get me wrong, they can still be good deals and save you the depreciation you’d lose by driving a new car off the lot, but you may find it interesting that that fleet dealer still paid thousands less for it new than what you’re paying for it used a year or 18 months later.
*I’ll close with this, the Ridgeline-and Honda’s in general make awful fleet cars because Honda doesn’t do much fleet sales, so you won’t see them as rentals or leases (try to find a Ridgeline factory lease—you can’t). Manufacturers and Fleet companies make their biggest profit in genuine body-on-frame trucks. That $1-2k profit I mentioned on a Corolla, try $5-$15,000 profit on a Chevy Silverado. Multiply that by thousands of trucks and cars and you have the fleet biz. We Ridgeline owners should be lucky, they hold their value very well, but they aren’t selling well. The reason is fleet sales. With fleet sales included, they sell 5 F150s for every one Ridgeline. If Honda knows it can keep the supply in line, then the retail customer (non-fleet) demand will be steady and loyal and the residual value will be insane. End of diatribe- the Ridgeline is actually a not-half-bad vehicle investment.