People put down deposits for every electric truck in development, leaving dealers in the lurch when they eventually cancel all but one::When an electric truck customer doesn’t show up to pick up their order, dealer are left with a car that might be hard to sell to someone else.
Dealer markups the last few years have pushed significant market share to fixed price sales like tesla, polestar, and rivian. I ended up with a polestar after I couldn’t find a Ford Mach E, hyundai ioniq5 or VW ID4 without markup. Are we supposed to feel sorry for them when they have inventories building up?
And that it’s their fault for gouging and thinking people won’t shop around? They’ve done it to themselves with greed.
Yeah, same. I never dreamed that a Tesla would be the cheaper option (summer 2022 at peak prices) compared to a Mach e, ev6, or ioniq5, but my dealerships all had 15k markups, and each car has features I wanted gated behind higher trims, so they were all like 60k+ after markups (don’t remember specifics since it was over a year ago)
Thankfully I got a ridiculous trade in check from my ID.4, so I was able to afford a huge downpayment on the model 3, although thanks to the price drops, I’m underwater again… good thing gap insurance is only $8 a month through my insurance
What does it mean to be underwater in this instance? And what is Gap insurance?
Underwater means that I owe more on the car than it’s worth. I bought it at $52K with a 15K downpayment, and at this point I owe $33K on it. Carvana estimates it’s worth $30K, so if I totaled it tomorrow, my insurance company would give me $30K, but then I’d be on the hook for the other $3,000. So gap insurance takes care of that. In fact, my gap policy says that if I total a car two years old or newer, they’ll pay it off and get me a brand new one as a replacement, and if it’s older than two years, they’ll get me one a year newer.
So I’m paying $8/month for the peace of mind that I don’t have to worry about out owing money in the case of a crash.
Obviously when I bought the car, I wasn’t expecting Tesla to drop the price so much and crater the used market
Thanks for responding! I’m glad I learned about this!
It’s because of how the manufacturers have set up the system. I posted a video above explaining how manufacturers control everything