I emailed every Subaru dealer around here and every single one of them gave me shenanigans except Carter.

Like there’s one in Auburn I think that claims “no haggle pricing”, so I contacted them and they told me they could give me a great deal of $25,500. I was like “LOL I know I can get $24,5 so you must be joking”, so the guy comes back with oh, okay actually we can match that price, so I was like “LOL I thought you gave great no haggle prices, I’m not gonna buy from you” so they came back with “okay we can do $24,300 but only if you get some options”. Etc standard dealer nonsense.

Anyway the only surprising thing about the story is that the guys at Carter Shoreline didn’t try any of that. And I got free skis due to some promotion they had that I didn’t even know about.

For one thing they just always show you a bell curve, not the actual samples. They don’t tell you anything about how many samples they got.

But also for the cars I have actually researched and know the real prices, I find TrueCar is way off.

For example I just bought a WRX for $24,500 with basically zero negotiation, I’m sure it could have been less, and TrueCar says the average is $25,900 which is a terrible price.

I’ve always found that just taking the “invoice” price is a more accurate way to tell the lowest price that you will be able to easily get.

Also once you pick a model, just go to the internet forum for that model and there will be a lot of threads of people saying “I paid this much”. The internet forum kids are generally fucking morons so they do things like include taxes and registration in what they post, so you have to subtract that off to get a comparable value.

I’ve noticed this with a lot of cars recently. I dunno if it’s just because I started with Hondas and old Hondas are one of the few cars to get the gear ratios right (?) or is it a new thing, or what? I dunno. Anyway, you’re right and it does suck. Even my Porsche suffers from this and it means there’s a dead zone from like 15 mph to 30 mph where you don’t really have the gearing you want (because 1st gear is screaming “don’t use me” and in 2nd your revs are still too low), and that just happens to be a very common speed for pootling around town.

I never thought about the kids kicking the back seats test. No way the GTI will pass that, I think the back seat room is even smaller than the Speed 3. But you should drive it anyway cuz it’s pretty fun.