Had not visited dealerships for 6 years until recently my Grand Cherokee reached 67k and started to give problems. To buy a new car is challenging because we are fighting on two fronts: (1) to get a good deal on the new car; (2) to trade our used car(s) for a fair price. After one day hard work by visiting a few dealerships I got my new car and traded in my Grand Cherokee and my old truck with a price 6k more than I orginally expected. Later, I tried to think about how it happened, I found the following factors:
1) Timing. My purchase was done by the last day of 2010, and last hour of that day.
2) I was dealing directly with the general sale manager by bypassing the sale representative.
1) is important because I guess the dealership I was dealing with need one more sale to reach a certain number of sales for last year in order to get some bonus from the manufacturer. In order to get the number, the dealer was willing to give more on my trade-ins and ask less for the new car. Other good time points on which you can get good deal may be the end of each month or fall when new models come in. Timing is an old trick many people know about it.
2) is not a known factor to me until I just learnt it in the recently transaction when I talked casually with the general sale manager in the dealership about how his sales people make money. According to him, a good sales person makes over a 100k easy, not by selling new cars, but by selling trade-ins - a sales person is responsible for selling the trade-ins he gets from the transation and benefits from the difference. His explaination of this arrangement explains nicely my own experiences at that night:
At the beginning, it was the sale person who directly deal with me and told me that my Grandcherokee was worth at most 14k and told me that my expectation should be less that that. Later, when the sales person was busy with other buyers, I walked into the general sales manager's office and asked him if he got the price for car. He said yes and my car was 16k.
At that time, the sale person apparently did not tell his manager how much he told me about my car's value. And my direct contact with the general manager reveals some possible arragement between the sale person and his manager: they play a game together to catch the customers!
This let me recall my other buying experiences when a sale person presents me with very lower offers at the beginning and constantly creased his offers after "talking" to his manager - when actually the sale serson was just giving up some of his own profits.
If this is true, then the person who seems to help us in a deal to get a better deal is the real problem for getting a fair values for our trade-ins. He is paid much less by his boss than by ignorant customers.
My guess might be wrong. Yet, one thing is for sure: if you directly deal with a manger than just a sale person, you can at least save some time in your negotiation and avoid some shrewd sales represenatives' manipulations.
(I just to illustrate some point so I did not mention new car purchase or my truck trade ins.).
Hope this helps.