Car dealers don't like email

It seems techniques in buying a car have changed, and and in some ways returned full-circle.

Six years ago when I bought my first car, the “hack” thing to do in order to get the best deal was to email plenty of dealerships, and then pit the respective quotes against each other. The prevailing wisdom back then was to get the numbers down concretely in email before you even step a foot inside the dealership. While I didn’t have the dealerships I contacted compete with each other because one in particular gave me the deal I had wanted immediately, the deal was indeed done completely over email. I remember spending just over an hour actually inside the dealer premise.

I really like that way of car buying.

The problem with the Internet being able to easily disseminate information to the masses is that what was once an obscure car-buying method used only by those in the know have evolved into a technique utilized by nearly everybody. The dealerships get bombarded with email inquiries, and for them it’s difficult to ascertain who’s a serious buyer and who’s simply looking for numbers to be used at a competitor. Due to this they aren’t quite as keen to do business over email as before.

I found this fact out last week when I was in the motions of buying a car for my father. I looked up the dealerships within travel distance and then sent them an email, detailing precisely the model and trim I wanted and to please provide me with a suitable quote. I wasn’t looking to shop the quotes afterwards to attain the best price: I was completely ready to pull the trigger with the first salesperson to email me an offer within the price target I had researched (TrueCar is nice).

Of the half dozen dealers I contacted, only one was willing to talk concrete numbers over email. The other salespeople replied with generic boilerplate asking when I am free to visit the dealership or to give them a call for the best price. Initially I was extremely put off by this because why can’t they respect my time and preference to communicate over email? I even wrote in the initial email that I was ready to purchase by the end of the week.

It was after mulling it over few days (and working out a deal over text-message) that I realize these days email inquiries are a dime a dozen and therefore dealers treat them as not serious. Contrast to over half decade ago when a detailed email from a customer would denote a knowledgable buyer with zero bullshit. To convey the same intentions today, one needs to do the opposite and actually call or show up: person to person communication projects a customer’s seriousness.

It’s definitely more time consuming that way, but what was once a hack is no more, and the personable “traditional” way of buying a car is now the hack. Funny how that is.

Clean Nissan S14s are difficult to find. I hope the owner of this car keeps it like this forever.

Heel-toe downshift

Learning how to drive a car with manual transmission isn’t all that difficult. A few hours in an empty parking lot, assuming you already know how to drive, is all it takes to master the art of shifting gears on your own. That’s precisely how I learned it way back when.

However, the advance stick-shift technique of heel-toe downshifting is proving to be more troublesome. I’d thought myself so uncoordinated that for the first almost decade of driving a manual, I didn’t even bother learning the technique. It wasn’t until I bought the Mazda MX-5 two years ago that I determined to learn the skill once and for life, to complete the repertoire.  

13,000 driven miles later, my heel-toe downshifts are still highly inconsistent. 

Perhaps I was over optimistic at the amount of time necessary to learn it well. Also I tend to switch up shoes everyday - with differing sole thickness - which surely throws my foot’s muscle memory for a loop. It certainly isn’t fault of the car, because the pedal set-up, clutch effort, and gearbox feel in the ND Miata is absolutely sublime. There’s hardly a better car on the market to learn heel-toe with, except a rental car with a stick. 

The challenge continues, then. I don’t care what sort of extra pain/early death I’m inflicting on the clutch, the goal remains to be able to get into the car wearing any shoe and heel-toe downshift with the same consistency as normal rev-matching without braking. 

Wish me luck.