Say your local Jag dealer locates a car with the specs/options you are interested in at another dealer (in the US). Will I, as the customer, be expected to pay for the transport of said car to my local dealer? Or is it really up to the discretion of the dealer whether they want to charge me for it or not?

If you've gone that route when buying your Jag, what was your experience, and how much was the cost, if any?

Thanks!

 

50 miles? 1500 miles? 3000 miles?

I suspect the dealer you buy from will factor the transportation costs when negotiating the selling price to you. In essence, the shipping simply increases their cost of sale, which leaves less margin, which leaves left negotiating room, which could hurt you

You'll be bearing the expense...or most of it, I reckon... even if it doesn't appear as a separate entry anywhere on the sales contract.

There are numerous approaches to handling this. It's just another part of the negotiation process

Others will chime in

Cheers
DD

 

Doug is correct in that whatever the dealer has as an added cost to a vehicle is in one form or another passed on to the customer. I spent 30 years in the new car business with the last 11-12 as a Mopar dealer in Florida and 'dealer trades' were a normal part of our everyday business.

No dealer can keep in stock every model and every permutation that the factory builds so dealers trade inventory all the time to satisfy a customer's choices. I've even had a dealer fly a driver over to the local municipal airport to pick-up a car to be driven back by the driver.


Depending on distance and model they were usually picked up by a local retiree who specialized in that small end of the business. Often a former salesman or manager who had retired. Longer hauls and higher end models (Vipers, etc.) would get trucked, but of course that cost a good deal more.

Given the distance between Jag dealers (they aren't built every 10-15 miles like the domestics) you could expect it to cost a couple of hundred or more and will have to accept the miles.

 

The last dealer I worked for had a slew of on-call "dealer-trade" drivers to get cars between dealers. For longer hauls we had our own plat-bed transporter. Fairly common up here in the PNW, at least.

Cheers
DD

 

I went through the "dealer trade" route in 2009, when my wife and I bought our XF. As mentioned, a lot of it has to do with the distance involved. I'm in the Rochester, NY area, and they traded a car with a Pittsburgh, PA dealership.


Being "high end" cars, and due to the distance, about 300-350 miles, the deal was done by flat bed. The cost was around $900, and the dealer split it with me.


I'm not sure what I'm going to do, in the near future, as I might have to find a new XJ. My wife was "rear-ended", 5 weeks ago, while stopped for a traffic light. The impact drove her into the car in front of her, so our car was damaged at both ends. I just got an updated damage estimate about an hour ago, as the body shop finally was able to get it into the shop and do a more thorough and more detailed damage evaluation.


It appears that the car will be totaled, and my local dealer doesn't have anything in stock, at the moment, that suites our color tastes. Therefore, another dealer trade may be in our future....

 

I would think that if it's a dealer that they trade back and forth with, the cost would be minimal - especially if they have the staff (runners) to swap out the vehicles. I can't speak for Jag but when we bought our Audi S4, our local dealer made a trade with another Audi dealer several hours away and still gave us the same pricing for the exact same car other than color.

 

its totally at the discretion of the dealership, depending on your relationship with the dealer.

I've had a car swapped with a dealership approx 200 miles away....their porter drove it both ways to avoid charging me for delivery

 

I agree!


I'm going through that situation, once again. As previously mentioned, we're looking at getting another XJ, since our beloved 2012 XJ-L was indeed totaled. We found another car at a dealership about 180 miles away, and in discussing the transport, my dealer put it this way.....To send a "porter" to get the car, in this situation, wouldn't be cost effective, since we're not going to do a trade, we're doing a "dealer transfer".


We'd need to send 2 drivers out in one car, to get the XJ, and then they'd both drive back in the 2 cars. We'd have to put gas in the cars, and pay the Thruway tolls, pay the drivers, etc. Therefore it's more cost effective, in this situation, to simply "flat bed" it. And, as mentioned above, since I have an excellent, and long standing relationship with the dealer, AND the cost of this transfer isn't too steep, they're absorbing it as a cost of doing business.

 

As a now retired but former new car dealer with both a Chrysler products dealership and a Nissan dealership who started in the 'business' as a university student back in 1968 I'm always amused by posters who think that dealers, or any business for that matter, can just absorb an endless amount of the "costs of doing business" with out any thought that at some point somewhere in the negotiations the dealer has to be concerned with making a profit.

At the time when I sold my businesses and retired in 1999 my overhead at just my Chrysler store was $5000 a DAY ($152,000 every month) for 365 days of the year. That included the days I was closed as I was on Sundays and legal holidays, etc. That's $5000+ of GROSS profit, not sales, I had to make EVERY DAY before the business would see a nickel of profit.

Most dealerships in the U.S. operate with somewhere between 2-5% net before taxes when ALL the numbers have been crunched and all the bills and salaries and benefits have been covered. To put that in a different way that means that in order to put $2-5 in the bank as NET profit the business had to do from 20 to 50 times that much GROSS business. A $50 screw-up by a technician or a $50 additional expense incurred as a "cost of doing business" was the same as giving away some $1000 to $2500 in gross profit.

At some point in all that goes on at a dealership they HAVE to actually find a way to actually MAKE a profit and it isn't easy and hasn't been for perhaps 30 or more years since it would appear that everyone thinks they should be able to buy a car for $100 over the dealers cost and the dealer should absorb everything else as a "cost of doing business".

I'm not advocating that people should pay sticker or that all dealers are saints but I do know that the vast majority of people have an entirely wrong impression of almost every aspect of how expensive these operations are and how much they contribute to the financial strength of their communities and the states in which they operate.

For just on example of the latter, in the 90's in Florida (and perhaps still today) new and used car dealerships statewide were responsible for 90% of the sales taxes collected in that state. NINTY PERCENT !!