I can't help it if the dealer didn't do their due diligence, and FWIW, they asked me nothing about the vehicle whatsoever. Not one word.
They took it for a test drive, had their mechanic look at it, and made me an offer on it. Who am I to argue with that? Should I jump up and yell, "Oh no, that's waaaay too much!!"
I gave them my old Jeep as a trade in but I don't think they really checked it very well. They test drove it and had a mechanic look at it, but it's really hard to completely evaluate a vehicle in 30 minutes. Especially since the error log had been cleared the day before so it was mostly empty.:)
There was just a bunch of stuff that wasn't obvious without some digging or extended driving. Here's what I figure:
Transmission: ~$2000
4 new tires: ~$1200 Fix overheating problem: ??, but probably $300 AC/hot air vent issue: $300 minimum (gotta tear the whole dash apart to get to it, plus parts) EGR and emissions problems: $300 minimum, probably more Replace rear differential: gotta be $400 if it's a dime, probably more Fuel injectors: ~$200, possibly more Ignition system: who knows, but I bet it wouldn't be cheap Headlamp: $10 (because they're a dealer, but still...lol)
Had to be around at least $5000 worth of shit to fix on that truck to get it all squared away.
They ended up giving me $3000 for the Jeep Cherokee (and trust me, they had no idea what they were getting into). It might have been worth half that or a little more. But no way it was worth $3000.
Yep, NEVER buy a rental car. People like me used to drive those cars and I can promise you've they've been driven like shit with NO regard for anything.
Many people also drive rental cars like they're stolen.
Ay-yup. This is true, and I'm one of the people that used to do it.
Buy a used fleet vehicle (eg last year's model from a rental company)
NEVER do this. People like me used to drive those cars and I can promise you've they've been driven like shit with NO regard for anything. I used to beat rental cars like a bad dog. I would never, EVER buy a used fleet vehicle- worst idea ever.
Good for you, but in my experience the game you describe cannot be played.
I don't know why not. I've done this with the last 3 new cars I bought and they had to play along or they don't get a sale.
>Me: "This is my best price, can you beat it?" Dealer: "I can only take that price to my manager if it is in writing" Me: "It's a real quote. I'm going with them unless someone beats it" Dealer: "Okay, bye"
No problem, then I go to the next one. Sooner or later you'll find one who's hungry. May not work for cars that are in super-high demand, but those aren't the kinds of cars I usually want. I also wait until the end of the month so they're more desperate to squeeze in one last sale to make their quotas.
'Is there any way I can get you in this car today?' I replied 'Nope'.
I'm upfront with them- I tell them that I'll be buying withing the next 48 hours and whoever gives me the best deal wins. And no, I don't go for the "come in and lets talks" shit, and I tell them flat out, "I'm not coming in, so just give me your best price and I'll give you a chance to meet or beat any lower quote I get." Works like a charm.
I pitch it to them as the "easiest sale they'll make all month", all they have to do is quote me the lowest price with taxes and fees figured in.
"Give me the price I'd need to write you a check for" is my line. If I go in and it's a dollar over that, I show them the quote they sent me and dare them to go back on the "firm price quote" they just sent me. They never have because they know it would create a shitstorm for them.
They may hate me, but I sleep just fine at night.:)
We just bought our outright and cut them to the bone. "We have X number of dollars, if you can meet that, great, if not, goodbye." Works very well as long as you're willing to hang up the phone.:)
I saved over $7K on my wife's car and never left my comfy chair. I sometimes have them email me the quotes so I can forward them to other dealers. And of course I would never, EVER edit the prices in the email to make it look like the price was actually lower than it really was. Because that would be wrong.
Problem is, that really only works with cars that not enough people are buying, and will be sitting around on the lot.
Not always...most dealers share inventory and will transfer a car from one lot to another to make a sale. They do it all the time.
Sure, if you want some very specific options you may have a harder time finding the exact model you want, but I've never had any difficulty doing it.
Also, wait until the end of the month when they're more desperate to make the sales quota for the month and they'll be much more willing to do whatever it takes to make a sale.
But that's just it- I don't negotiate. I let them beat each other to death and when they've hit rock bottom, then I swoop in.
Sure there's a markup, and I don't begrudge them a reasonable fee. They gotta make a profit too...but if I can shave $5K to $7K off the cost of the car, fuck yeah I'll do it.
My last vehicle went from ~$29,200 to just over $22,000 without ever leaving my office chair., What's not to like about that?:)
Lol, I love beating the dealers to pieces. I game the hell out of them and they can't do a thing about it. Here's what I do.....
I start with the best advertised car price and call each dealer near me.
I say, "Here's our best price so far, can you meet it? No, we're not coming in. Just email me your best price and if it's good then we'll come in." I told them exactly what model so the quotes would all be for the exact same vehicle. I also emailed several of them competing quotes from other dealers.
So I did this several times, getting lower and lower quotes each time.:) They complained bitterly about my doing this, but they beat each other senseless trying to shave another hundred or so off the last set of quotes.
They would say, "Well if I give you a price then you'll just go to another dealer and they'll give you a lower quote, wah wah wah".
And I said, "Damn right I will, wouldn't you? I'm just doing my due diligence trying to get a fair price quote. If you don't want to get this sale, don't give me a quote, it's not a problem."
"Wah wah wah" went the dealers. "This is unfair", "You're just taking advantage of us!", "Wah wah wah", and so on. lol
But they kept giving us lower and lower quotes. So fug 'em. It's not like I was putting a gun to their heads.:)
Then I found out something interesting. The dealer physically closest to you is under A LOT of pressure from the car company to sell the car to you, it has to do with their service area and their local sales market. Apparently they get big brownie points for making sales close to their dealership, and they get frowned on if they lose a sale to another dealer farther away. But a dealer farther away will quite happily sell you a car no matter where you live. Hmmmm, let me think about that.... Muwahahahaha.:)
So once they'd beat each other down pretty close to what they claimed was the "lowest price" they could offer, I spoke to the closest dealer to me (Dealer "A") and told them that Dealer "X' (about 25 miles away) had made me a really good offer, so I was probably going to buy from Dealer "X' , and I was just letting Dealer "A" know to be polite. Cuz I'm a polite guy, you know? That's what makes me so fucking loveable.
Whoah baby. I was getting a pretty good discount before, but now, as they say, "shit got real". And Dealer "A" dropped the price considerably and threw in a bunch of extra crap and offered to name their first-born child after me. I told them, "Well, I gotta tell Dealer "X" that I'll probably go with you guys then".
"Oh noes, don't call them!! They'll just offer you a better deal, err, I mean..."
So to make a long story short, I went through this "closest/farther" cycle a few times, and the prices kept getting lower and lower. And I hadn't even left the house yet, this was all by phone and email .:)
We did finally end up going with the dealer closest to us, and although I'm sure they made money on the car, they didn't make nearly as much as they would have liked to. We saved over $5000 from the original "best price". I've tried not to cry myself to sleep over this.
It's an old TV show. It was before my time and I'm reaching greybeard status.
Greybeard here....I watched it while still a wee lad. One the stars (and one of my first sort-of crushes) Melody Patterson died recently. She played the ever bodacious "Wrangler Jane", a feisty, no-nonsense gal who spawned a million teenage boy's fantasies.
just wanted to let you know that all my PHP based websites are running fine for many, many years. Without patching that is. And yes, they've seen a lot of hack attempts. None was successful.
Same here...like you, I'm a "self-trained PHP monkey".
I run dozens of sites, some going back ~12 years or so. Hackers throw themselves against my sites constantly and none of them have managed to get in or run a successful exploit. Careful coding and rigorous sanitizing of incoming data is really all it takes.
Today I learned that I write more secure code than all of the fucking coders at Joomla put together.
A decent sized company with loads of resources, lots of code reviews, using Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, SuckMyPecker, and (supposedly) staffed with experienced programmers, and they STILL fuck it up.
Slashdot Mirror
You aren't entitled to a university spending time and money to give you a platform to spread your message.
I couldn't agree more- a university is no place to allow free speech or controversial ideas!
I can't help it if the dealer didn't do their due diligence, and FWIW, they asked me nothing about the vehicle whatsoever. Not one word.
They took it for a test drive, had their mechanic look at it, and made me an offer on it. Who am I to argue with that? Should I jump up and yell, "Oh no, that's waaaay too much!!"
OMG, if we let people say whatever they want, they might say something that conflicts with my worldview and gives me a boo-boo or a tummyache.
Wah Wah Wah!
SJWs, please help protect me from hearing anything I don't like!!
I love nothing more then proving pedantic fools wrong. :)
'than'
Lol, *BOOM*, headshot!
Heh heh....
I gave them my old Jeep as a trade in but I don't think they really checked it very well. They test drove it and had a mechanic look at it, but it's really hard to completely evaluate a vehicle in 30 minutes. Especially since the error log had been cleared the day before so it was mostly empty. :)
There was just a bunch of stuff that wasn't obvious without some digging or extended driving. Here's what I figure:
Transmission: ~$2000
4 new tires: ~$1200
Fix overheating problem: ??, but probably $300
AC/hot air vent issue: $300 minimum (gotta tear the whole dash apart to get to it, plus parts)
EGR and emissions problems: $300 minimum, probably more
Replace rear differential: gotta be $400 if it's a dime, probably more
Fuel injectors: ~$200, possibly more
Ignition system: who knows, but I bet it wouldn't be cheap
Headlamp: $10 (because they're a dealer, but still...lol)
Had to be around at least $5000 worth of shit to fix on that truck to get it all squared away.
They ended up giving me $3000 for the Jeep Cherokee (and trust me, they had no idea what they were getting into). It might have been worth half that or a little more. But no way it was worth $3000.
Seeing as how MySQL is the second most popular database system in the world, it might be more than that.
And many people beat the crap out of rental cars.
Yep, NEVER buy a rental car. People like me used to drive those cars and I can promise you've they've been driven like shit with NO regard for anything.
Many people also drive rental cars like they're stolen.
Ay-yup. This is true, and I'm one of the people that used to do it.
Buy a used fleet vehicle (eg last year's model from a rental company)
NEVER do this. People like me used to drive those cars and I can promise you've they've been driven like shit with NO regard for anything. I used to beat rental cars like a bad dog. I would never, EVER buy a used fleet vehicle- worst idea ever.
Good for you, but in my experience the game you describe cannot be played.
I don't know why not. I've done this with the last 3 new cars I bought and they had to play along or they don't get a sale.
>Me: "This is my best price, can you beat it?"
Dealer: "I can only take that price to my manager if it is in writing"
Me: "It's a real quote. I'm going with them unless someone beats it"
Dealer: "Okay, bye"
No problem, then I go to the next one. Sooner or later you'll find one who's hungry. May not work for cars that are in super-high demand, but those aren't the kinds of cars I usually want. I also wait until the end of the month so they're more desperate to squeeze in one last sale to make their quotas.
'Is there any way I can get you in this car today?' I replied 'Nope'.
I'm upfront with them- I tell them that I'll be buying withing the next 48 hours and whoever gives me the best deal wins. And no, I don't go for the "come in and lets talks" shit, and I tell them flat out, "I'm not coming in, so just give me your best price and I'll give you a chance to meet or beat any lower quote I get." Works like a charm.
I pitch it to them as the "easiest sale they'll make all month", all they have to do is quote me the lowest price with taxes and fees figured in.
"Give me the price I'd need to write you a check for" is my line. If I go in and it's a dollar over that, I show them the quote they sent me and dare them to go back on the "firm price quote" they just sent me. They never have because they know it would create a shitstorm for them.
They may hate me, but I sleep just fine at night. :)
We just bought our outright and cut them to the bone. "We have X number of dollars, if you can meet that, great, if not, goodbye." Works very well as long as you're willing to hang up the phone. :)
I saved over $7K on my wife's car and never left my comfy chair. I sometimes have them email me the quotes so I can forward them to other dealers. And of course I would never, EVER edit the prices in the email to make it look like the price was actually lower than it really was. Because that would be wrong.
Problem is, that really only works with cars that not enough people are buying, and will be sitting around on the lot.
Not always...most dealers share inventory and will transfer a car from one lot to another to make a sale. They do it all the time.
Sure, if you want some very specific options you may have a harder time finding the exact model you want, but I've never had any difficulty doing it.
Also, wait until the end of the month when they're more desperate to make the sales quota for the month and they'll be much more willing to do whatever it takes to make a sale.
Some people do enjoy the negotiation.
But that's just it- I don't negotiate. I let them beat each other to death and when they've hit rock bottom, then I swoop in.
Sure there's a markup, and I don't begrudge them a reasonable fee. They gotta make a profit too...but if I can shave $5K to $7K off the cost of the car, fuck yeah I'll do it.
My last vehicle went from ~$29,200 to just over $22,000 without ever leaving my office chair., What's not to like about that? :)
Lol, I love beating the dealers to pieces. I game the hell out of them and they can't do a thing about it. Here's what I do.....
I start with the best advertised car price and call each dealer near me.
I say, "Here's our best price so far, can you meet it? No, we're not coming in. Just email me your best price and if it's good then we'll come in." I told them exactly what model so the quotes would all be for the exact same vehicle. I also emailed several of them competing quotes from other dealers.
So I did this several times, getting lower and lower quotes each time. :) They complained bitterly about my doing this, but they beat each other senseless trying to shave another hundred or so off the last set of quotes.
They would say, "Well if I give you a price then you'll just go to another dealer and they'll give you a lower quote, wah wah wah".
And I said, "Damn right I will, wouldn't you? I'm just doing my due diligence trying to get a fair price quote. If you don't want to get this sale, don't give me a quote, it's not a problem."
"Wah wah wah" went the dealers. "This is unfair", "You're just taking advantage of us!", "Wah wah wah", and so on. lol
But they kept giving us lower and lower quotes. So fug 'em. It's not like I was putting a gun to their heads. :)
Then I found out something interesting. The dealer physically closest to you is under A LOT of pressure from the car company to sell the car to you, it has to do with their service area and their local sales market. Apparently they get big brownie points for making sales close to their dealership, and they get frowned on if they lose a sale to another dealer farther away. But a dealer farther away will quite happily sell you a car no matter where you live. Hmmmm, let me think about that.... Muwahahahaha. :)
So once they'd beat each other down pretty close to what they claimed was the "lowest price" they could offer, I spoke to the closest dealer to me (Dealer "A") and told them that Dealer "X' (about 25 miles away) had made me a really good offer, so I was probably going to buy from Dealer "X' , and I was just letting Dealer "A" know to be polite. Cuz I'm a polite guy, you know? That's what makes me so fucking loveable.
Whoah baby. I was getting a pretty good discount before, but now, as they say, "shit got real". And Dealer "A" dropped the price considerably and threw in a bunch of extra crap and offered to name their first-born child after me. I told them, "Well, I gotta tell Dealer "X" that I'll probably go with you guys then".
"Oh noes, don't call them!! They'll just offer you a better deal, err, I mean..."
So to make a long story short, I went through this "closest/farther" cycle a few times, and the prices kept getting lower and lower. And I hadn't even left the house yet, this was all by phone and email . :)
We did finally end up going with the dealer closest to us, and although I'm sure they made money on the car, they didn't make nearly as much as they would have liked to. We saved over $5000 from the original "best price". I've tried not to cry myself to sleep over this.
I'm warning you, Dobbs...
Damn, now I feel old.
It's an old TV show. It was before my time and I'm reaching greybeard status.
Greybeard here....I watched it while still a wee lad. One the stars (and one of my first sort-of crushes) Melody Patterson died recently. She played the ever bodacious "Wrangler Jane", a feisty, no-nonsense gal who spawned a million teenage boy's fantasies.
FFS, this should surprise NO ONE.
The default behavior for almost everything these days is to suck up as much information as possible no matter what the Terms Of Service say.
I'd be surprised if it didn't also log the GPS coordinates, movement, and anything else it can grab.
"Sorry, your honour, I was just acting recklessly."
I know, one of them said it was a "mistake".
No, a "mistake" is when you put too much sugar in your coffee.
Shooting a kid to death within 5 seconds of arriving on-scene seems more like "wanton murder" to me.
. Nevertheless, police clearly acted recklessly.
Yeah, no shit. What's your fucking point?
find who is running them, and cut their fingers off.
And put the fingers in the same box as their head.
The real question is whether the Dridex botnet will work with the Internet Of Things?
Because if it can't infect my toaster and refrigerator then it won't get my respect.
Gosh, I just can't believe that Sony would ever do something wrong or underhanded or malicious or evil.
just wanted to let you know that all my PHP based websites are running fine for many, many years. Without patching that is. And yes, they've seen a lot of hack attempts. None was successful.
Same here...like you, I'm a "self-trained PHP monkey".
I run dozens of sites, some going back ~12 years or so. Hackers throw themselves against my sites constantly and none of them have managed to get in or run a successful exploit. Careful coding and rigorous sanitizing of incoming data is really all it takes.
Cheers!
Oh wow! If only you could somehow filter out injection attacks!
I know...if only there was a way. But we all know it's totally impossible to do, so we might as well get used to it.
Today I learned that I write more secure code than all of the fucking coders at Joomla put together.
A decent sized company with loads of resources, lots of code reviews, using Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, SuckMyPecker, and (supposedly) staffed with experienced programmers, and they STILL fuck it up.