Wed 21 Jun 2006
On August 22, 1989, my dad and myself went to Springfield and bought a new Toyota pickup with 21 miles on it. In the last seventeen years or so, my truck has been good to me. I’ve had a couple of major things done to it, but it’s been remarkably well behaved for its age. However, time is eventually going to become the enemy, and I decided a couple of years ago that I needed to start planning for this eventuality.
So, I started putting a little money aside each month to help make a down payment on a new or newer vehicle. The Toyota Prius has been a very interesting car to watch. I love the keyless entry and ignition, the gas mileage it gets is rather impressive, and it’s a Toyota. However, when I started running the numbers, I just couldn’t monetarily justify the Prius. The price premium would take many many years to recoup, and the hybrid technology is changing so fast right now that it really is a game for early adopters, and I wasn’t in the mood to do that.
So, I thought for a while about a fun two seater, but ended up going with something more useful: A Toyota Camry. Toyota had redesigned the Camry for the 2007 model year, and I liked the new design, so I started looking around.
I’ve never enjoyed the negotiation stage of car buying. For this vehicle, I thought I’d probe some dealers via the internet before going in and visiting in person. So, I went to Toyota’s website and sent in a request for a quote to the Toyota dealership in Decatur (about an hour from here) and the local dealership, O’Brien Auto Park. Dale Grinestaff from the Decatur dealership responded promptly. To this day, O’Brien still hasn’t responded. A day or two later I sent mail to additional dealerships, in Mattoon (about 45 miles away) and Danville (30 miles away). The Danville dealership never responded. Phil Holdren from the Mattoon dealership responded promptly.
I started working with the Decatur dealership. I asked for a price on a Camry LE, 4 cyl, auto, sunroof, VSC, and the JBL audio system. There were only 2 of these in the United States, apparently, and I thought a lot about it and ended up dropping the JBL audio system. I went to Edmunds, and got the “low down” on the car. List price, Invoice Price, and what other people in the area are typically paying for that vehicle. Even this new car was a pretty rare thing. In fact, it just didn’t exist. At the time, I wasn’t that concerned about the color, but I ended up settling on the red color over time.
Dale said that he had the option of trying to “change” one of the incoming Camrys to match my requested configuration. Toyota isn’t like GM or other companies, though. With GM, you can “order” a car to your specifications, and they’ll make it for you. With Toyota, you can “suggest” that they change one of their incoming cars to match, but that’s it. Each dealer gets their predetermined allocation, and that’s just the way it is. So, Dale said that he could try and change one. He also offered me a price about $1,200 below list as a starting point.
Phil, from Mattoon responded to my request. He said that nothing was available, but that he had had good luck changing cars and that he could try, if I was interested.
I went to the local dealer and test drove one of the Camry LEs. It didn’t have the stability control or the sunroof, but it gave me a feel for what the car would be like. I didn’t bother telling the guy there that I had sent an unanswered email earlier. I just let him give me the story on the car. After the test drive he “invited me inside” to check and see when they might get a car in that matched my request. After sitting there for 5 minutes or so the basic line was that there wasn’t anything, and they didn’t know when they would get anything. And, they offered to let me know when something came in. No mention or offer of trying to change a car to match my requested specs. I’d say I was there for about an hour or so. The next day I got a call from the salesman. He said, “You were looking for the Avalon, right?”. Not impressed.
Meanwhile, Phil kept in contact with me. One day in early May he emailed me and said that he had attempted to change an incoming car to match my specs, and after the second attempt, it went through, and that they should have a car on the lot June 10th that perfectly matched my specifications. I hadn’t been emailing him real regularly. I wasn’t in a huge hurry to purchase, but he had taken the initiative, and actually changed an incoming car without any sort of confirmation or intent to buy on my part at all. Granted, he could have, no doubt, sold the car to someone else from off the lot, but the fact that he was willing to do that meant a lot to me. I told him that the other dealer had offered me the price that it had, and he went a couple of hundred dollars lower than that.
I emailed Dale back and told him this, and I have yet to actually hear a response from him.
I was out of town the last half of May, but when I got back into town I confirmed the June 10 arrival with Phil.
On June 10, I got an email from him saying that the car had arrived the night before. Up to this point, I actually hadn’t offered a price at all for the car. I was content to just let the dealers battle it out. But, since one of the dealers had “left the building”, so to speak, that wasn’t working out well for me. Knowing that a car was on the lot solidified in my mind that it was time to make a decision. So, it was time to get serious. I had planned to get him down a few hundred dollars, and thought that I’d be able to do that. But, you never know. Brand new car.. they are selling like crazy.. hard to say. But, I sent him some numbers. One was at invoice price, and another was about 2.5% over invoice.
He responded, and agreed to the 2.5% over invoice price! If I had known he would do that, I would have gone lower. 
This actually ended up six or seven hundred dollars below where we had been at before.
So, I responded saying that I’d need the car pretty quick if I decided to buy (I had to go out of town in a couple of days); that I didn’t know how I’d get down to Mattoon, and that I was curious about what they could do for financing.
He said that they could have the car ready, that they would come and pick me up (90 miles roundtrip) and he quoted me a loan rate about 1.5% lower than my own bank had quoted me. Furthermore, he said that they could be flexible on the financing. If I didn’t have the financing totally procured they could talk to the bank and make sure that things were in progress, or that they could work with a check and wait to deposit it.. Basically, they were wanting to work with me.
At this point, I decided it was time to decide. I decided to go for it, and, for the first time, picked up a phone to call him. I had done all of the negotiations without ever having to deal with the “car salesman” face to face. Granted, I did drive the car from another dealer, but, other than that, I didn’t have to see a salesman.
When I talked to Phil on the phone, he said that he could come up that evening and we could get things taken care of. So, he came and picked me up (got here a few minutes late). He was a youngish guy. On the way back down to Mattoon we talked about various things. He was friendly, but not “salesman” friendly. Just friendly. A few minutes after we got there, my car arrived from being filled up with gas. It was pretty. I looked it over pretty good. I found one tiny little scratch on the passenger’s side mirror that they looked into, and then I went inside to take care of all of the paperwork.
During that part of the process, I was asked to purchase extended warranties. Before Doug (the banker guy) showed me the paper, he said that everything was optional. They had extensions to 7 years, and something like 100,000 miles. As always, they had the “new” and “old” monthly payments listed. After asking a few questions, I discovered that the actual flat fee for the extended warranty started at about a $1,000 and went north from there. I said no, he took the sheet of paper away, and that was that. No hard sell.
While all of this was going on, Phil was putting license plates on the car, and working on that mini scratch a little bit. Once I had the paperwork taken care of (signing one’s name 17 times is always a good time) I went out to the car and Phil showed me how everything worked. We ran into a small problem with the sunroof. The tilt-down function was running the glass down flat, but then going back up again. Both Phil and Doug looked at it, but never did figure anything out. They said that there had been a bulletin at one point describing something similar that could happen if the sunroof hadn’t been properly initialized, and that they would get ahold of me the next day and have me press the proper buttons to see if that fixed it. If not, they would come and pick the car up and get it taken care of.
The car had 3.8 miles on it. I felt quite lucky to have the car with so few miles on it. This was one of the reasons that I didn’t delay very long in deciding to purchase it. I knew that if I did, they would probably let other people test drive it, and I just didn’t want that. Other than that, the thing seemed just dandy. I headed out about 7pm from the dealership and proceeded north towards Champaign.
Floormats were close to a two hundred dollar option, so I declined. But, I knew I wanted floormats, so I headed to Walmart to pick some up. I got some gray ones that matched the interior, and then I went over to Rob’s house to show him the car. He felt compelled to take a couple of pictures of me 
with his new camera. We went for a short ride around the block and then I went home and trimmed the floormats to where they would fit nicely and put them in.
The next day I tried the reset techniques for the sunroof that Phil and Doug emailed and faxed me. Nothing worked. But, a couple of times that day when I tried it, the button did what it should. The rest of the time it went down and up, but a couple of times it worked properly. Over the next few days it started working all the time. Now I can press the down button and it does exactly what it should. Go figure.
Since the purchase 9 days ago I’ve put over 900 miles on the car. I’ve been annoyed to discover that there is another red Camry in the parking garage where I work. But, when you buy the best selling car in the nation you have to expect that. I drove the car down to Missouri and managed 28.4mpg on the one fillup that I’ve had for it. I’m hoping the mileage gets better. No one can believe it is a Camry. The styling is totally different than before. I definitely approve of the new styling, though. I think I’m going to really enjoy the sunroof. It gives me a nice feeling to have it open. The car has a lot more power than my truck. I have to watch my speed; particularly when I pull out to pass another vehicle. All of the other features on the car (power everything) are also nice. It’s taking some getting used to, though. My truck didn’t have any of that stuff, so I’m still in a learning phase.
All things considered, though, I’m glad I made the purchase. Hopefully Toyota’s legendary quality will carry through on this car, and I’ll have many years of trouble free use!
