$30,500 average: New Cars Increasingly Out of Reach for Many Americans

[DeschutesRiver]

124. I got an email from a dealer last week offering a Kia Soul for $12,900. And I found the same as you

on Nissans and Fords, plus a few Hondas and Subarus were under $20K. And I am not even trying hard yet, just doing an initial search for cars under $20k, and without even going to a wholesaler. And I had a lot of brand new cars from which to pick at that price.

I used a wholesale outfit for the first time to buy a travel trailer. After two futile years of trying to negotiate a lower price with local dealers (and ultimately checking with ALL who sold this model within my state), we ended up paying $8,000 less with the wholesaler . Well, might have been more, because some of the "deals" we'd negotiate would disappear once we showed up to buy the trailer, where it would be offered for a few thousand more than we'd discussed (about 10K more than the wholesaler we ended up using). Trailer shopping is as deceitful at times as car shopping - hated it until I dealt with the wholesale dude, who was straight forward about it - the price online that was emailed to me was the price. Period. No nonsense. The local dealers had told me I'd never get service if I bought it elsewhere, but when we needed a few things fixed, yes, we got them fixed under the warranty though it did take some looking for a dealer who wasn't angry about losing an 8k commission. They do exist, and are happy to get paid for warranty work.

I chose to make it a big vacation for us and the dogs to drive several states away to pick it up, but they would have hauled it here for around $1,000, which still would have resulted in a $7k savings on the low end. This isn't peanuts to save; I wasn't going to buy it otherwise.

This article is quite bogus in its conclusion about the average car price, imho.