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Fish... Where Do You Buy Your Toyotas ?

By bhp, April 4, 2015



I assume your buying used...where do you get your deals and how do you screen your potential Toyotas to avoid lemons...do you have a mechanic or you inspect yourself ??

thanks..

We've bought new and used Toyotas. Last two we got used, three we bought at the same dealership.

We usually look online first - that helps us bracket in a good price and find out where there are stocks of Toyotas or whatever else brand we are looking at. We test drive one, then I usually wander around and talk to the different techs, service writers, parts counter person and BS a little - you'd be surprised on how much backstory on the owner, dealership, and other employees you can pick up.

Not much you can do to screen out lemons, especially with Toytoas or other known reliable cars - aside from careful inspection of the cars. Even mechanics can miss something on the car. Whenever the car gets inspected, I ask that I also look at the car with the mechanic. Some places will not let you do that due to liability issues, but some shops are more accommodating.

As for deals - depends. On my Corolla - it was basically poor customer service that brought me over to them, and I lucked out as they were running a 0% financing promo. The others, we actually needed quickly, to replaced cars that were totaled (2003 Matrix XRS -> 2009 Matrix XRS in my sig). Rav4 - that was the hardest, as we had some very close contenders - CR-V, Q3, Tiguan, and Forester - ended up buying it at the same dealership we got the two Matrixes from.

The Corolla I bought used wasn't actually my first choice. I was at a neighboring Honda dealership looking at a loaded Civic, but they were so busy, no one came out to help me out. Even waited around for about hour. The owner actually had to come out and show me the car, but he didn't know where the key was - I indicated that if I could get someone to let me in the car in the next 10 minutes, I would buy it right on the spot. No dice. So I walked across the street to the Toyota dealership and bought the Corolla right on the spot - didn't even test drive it, as I was so pissed.



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