Hey Cool Car Fans,

I had to write an article about this website that is sweeping the Internet selling people on how they can drive an exotic car, like an Aston Martin DB9,Vantage, Ferrari, or other exotic, for the cost of leasing a Range Rover or a luxury vehicle.  The ploy is that if you pay $300 to take their seminar or series of webinars that you will learn the amazing secrets of how to exploit the exotic car dealers.

I’ve had so many people who have sent me the link on Facebook about this system that I had to write an article about it.  The first part of the gimmick, which you can find by watching some of their free videos, is that there are dealerships that purchase exotic vehicles and they want to turn them in 60 to 90 days.  This is true since all dealerships that inventory vehicles want to turn their inventory quickly.  It’s just not a big deal.

They go on to explain that many of these dealers end up getting stuck with their exotic cars for a number of months and then their only option is to sell it at auction or to another dealer at a massive loss.  You can even use a CARFAX report to see how long the vehicle has been in the dealer’s inventory.

This may or may not be true depending on the dealership because many dealers have the money to pay cash for these types of vehicles.  If they own them outright they may be willing to sit on them much longer, until the right buyer comes along, who is willing to pay all the money for a specific vehicle.  It’s not as though exotic car companies have a massive production line like a Chrysler Town and Country is built on.  Hence the name exotic cars.  Exotic cars can take a long time to sell, just like a million dollar home is going to take longer to sell than a $250,000 home.  This should be common sense.

One year, I sold a DeLorean DMC-12 from the early 1980’s, which isn’t an exotic like a Lamborghini, but it’s still a limited production vehicle for sure.  I remember some of the guys I knew told me that I would never get what I was asking for it.  I had a number of calls from people who wanted me to drop the price on it without even coming to look at the vehicle.

It didn’t take that long though and a guy who owned an oil company and who was a huge John DeLorean fan showed up and paid the asking price.  Not everyone is desperate to move a unique vehicle that they know are limited production cars.  There is something in business called supply and demand and it is really important when it comes to cars.  No two used vehicles are ever the same, so if a dealer is deeply discounting a vehicle, it could be because it has serious issues.  It may also be that they just traded for the vehicle and they don’t want to keep it in their inventory and are blowing it out.  This isn’t usually the case though with exotics.

The main sales pitch of the exotic car webinar guys is that they are going to teach you how to buy exotic cars at a huge discount.  Apparently, the dealer would rather earn a little more money retailing the vehicle than have virtually zero risk wholesaling it to another dealer or selling it at auction.

Often times I will wholesale a vehicle to another dealer instead of selling it retail because I don’t want the potential “heat” of having a customer come back to me on a vehicle with little profit.  It’s not worth the brain damage.  This is part of the business that these guys are failing to realize.  They make it sound like this happens all the time and the dealers are desperate and it really doesn’t. Most dealers that trade in exotics know their market pretty well, certainly better than the average guy who buys one car every few months or years and thinks he’s an expert.

Their pitch gets even better though.  They have their customers believing that if they buy the exotic car for say $200,000 instead of $250,000 that they can drive it for a few months and flip it again for a profit or for what they paid for it to some sucker or another exotic car dealer.  Apparently vehicles only depreciate when they are sitting on a dealer’s lot and not when a student of a $300 webinar is driving them around and putting miles on them.  And don’t forget that most people trying to get one of these at the payment of a “Range Rover”.  They are going to still have to qualify for their financing.  Honestly, do you think a $200,000 vehicle is going to have the same payment as a $70,000 vehicle?  Did someone fail math class?  Do you think the dealers are going to be begging to buy your vehicle three months later because you are such an amazing negotiator?

My favorite part of the video I watched was when he told his viewers that they should always ask for a salesperson who has been around for a long time.  Because these guys want to make a sale and they are not afraid to discount the vehicle.  He even advises people to not ask for the “new guy”, which is comical.  Have you ever talked to a salty and seasoned car salesman who has been around the car business for way too long?  I get talk to them regularly and many of them are nuts.  I’ve been around this business for over 13 years and I’m pretty nuts.  They are often seasoned pro’s at selling with very little patience for people who want to waste their time.

Someone who has been selling cars at a dealership for five, ten or twenty years, everyday is more often than not like a salty old sea captain.  I know one guy who would have people in his office trying to grind him down on a car purchase and he would just tip his glasses down and say, “Get out!”.  He would literally escort them out of his office and slam the door.  That’s the type of guy they’re telling their students to go and negotiate with, which is hilarious.

If someone is going to pay cash they are probably going to want to keep the vehicle and not dump it after a few months.  Which is probably what these guys are actually doing themselves.  After all, if you can sell 2,000 webinar courses on how to buy exotic cars at $300 a pop and earn $600,000, well you can definitely afford to buy a $200,000 Aston Martin DB9 or some other exotic vehicle for your sales “pitch”.

This reminds me of the late night television gurus of the 1980’s that were selling suckers on how to buy real estate with no money down, if they purchased their material.  They would usually get someone who bought one or two homes to get on their show and tell them how great their system worked, so they could fill a room.  The fact was that most of the people taking the class probably never bought one house after they ponied up to the bar to pay their fees.  The same exact concept is happening here by telling people how to do something that sounds too good to be true, while earning a huge profit selling a scam.

I earn my living, buying, selling, trading and leasing vehicles for people and I’ve done it for the past thirteen years.  I only get paid if a sale of a vehicle is made and if I charge people a commission it’s for actually delivering a tangible product.  If it really worked as well as they are saying, why wouldn’t they just keep the idea to themselves and go make money flipping their exotic cars?  The simple answer is because they earn way more money selling their amazing system that nobody else knows how to do than they would just using their car buying system.  And if you were to question them on it they will claim that you just don’t know what you’re doing, you’re stupid and they’re a genius.  Yes they are – at selling the “sizzle”.  Like anything else, it’s buyer beware.  Now people can hopefully quit sending me the link to their website.

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Auto Consultant – John Boyd: The Cool Car Guy
John is an auto consultant who owns CoolCarGuy.com that is a licensed car dealership in Lone Tree, CO.  He can help you save time and money on any make or model, new or used, lease or purchase – nationwide! Call or email John about your next vehicle! jboyd@coolcarguy.com or Twitter @coolcarguy

Hey Cool Car Fans,

I was recently reading one of the car magazines that I subscribe to and came across an article about new technologies.  These included things like thin-film solar panels on the roof and new windshield displays, along with five other new whiz bang features

I grew up in the Star Wars and Star Trek era where I hoped as a kid to be driving a land speeder by now. However, I also spend a small fortune each year repairing and fixing used cars.  If you haven’t had to pay to put in a windshield into a Mercedes Benz S550 with rain sensing wipers then you might get excited about solar panels on the roof of a car.  If you have had to fork over $1,500 or more for a windshield than you get where I am going with this article.

THE COST OF NEW TECHNOLOGY

New and improved technology is fantastic, until it is out of warranty and it breaks down.  The labor costs alone on many vehicle repairs are getting obscene.  There are franchise dealers in Denver charging $165 to $200 an hour just for labor and these are not to repair your Ferrari, but your daily driver.  When you add in the cost of expensive parts, suddenly the cost of ownership outside of the manufacturer’s warranty can be crazy high.

One of the new technologies that were mentioned in the article were putting batteries in the body panels.  This sounds like a great idea conceptually and it will probably even work.  Do you want to be the sucker though that buys that vehicle and pay the bill to insure the vehicle?  Think about the added cost when someone runs a red light and plows into the side of the car.  The body shop wouldn’t just be replacing a door or a few panels, but battery packs inside a door and panels. If sellers think they are getting screwed by a bad CARFAX now after an accident is reported, just wait until this new technology hits the market.

How about shock absorbers that turn energy created from a pothole into more miles per gallon?  Let’s be honest because most of the cars on the road today ride like crap because nobody wants to spend the money to replace their vehicle’s existing shocks or struts.  It’s already an expensive repair unless you are a gear head or mechanic and you can do it yourself.  Now add the additional complexity that the engineers want to add for better fuel economy and most used vehicles will need new shocks like they need new tires.  Only the majority of drivers won’t have the extra money to replace them.

Google, Apple and other Silicon Valley companies are investing heavily into the automotive industry.  The big automotive manufacturers are starting to embrace the “geeks” in California and their highly profitable business models.  Let me forwarn you now that you had better grab your wallet and hold on tight!  You may find in the future that leasing a vehicle is the only option that actually makes financial sense.

If you are enamored with the brilliance of Silicon Valley, you apparently haven’t had your kids break their, made in China, iPhone yet out of warranty and have to replace it for $200 or $300?  Have you seen the upgrade Tesla offers on their batteries for the older roadster at $25,000 for 350 miles of juice?  Who is going to flip the bill if you own an autonomous car from Google when it breaks down?  These companies are run by billionaires who know how to earn a buck off of the masses. I see the word “sucker” when I read about sone of these new whiz bang technologies.

An air suspension ride on a Mercedes Benz or BMW is fantastic until it goes out and you have to buy new air bags.  I see first hand how many people have to get out of their expensive vehicles when repair bills start cleaning out their bank account.  If the cars of the future continue adding more expensive technology that can and will fail it will get far worse.  One of the things that made Luke Skywalker’s Land Speeder such a cool ride was the simplicity of it.  It might be time for the car manufacturers to remember the old marketing saying, “less is more”.

Which is one of the reasons why buying older vehicles or classic cars that someone can fix up is starting to make much more sense for many people.  If you’re not going to lease a new one to share in the risk of repairs with the leasing company or the manufacturer with a lower monthly payment, why not drive an older and much cooler car for a far less overall cost of ownership.

I am getting more requests from people to help them find older classic cars, even like a 1979 Mercedes Benz 450SL that you can pickup for under $15,000 most of the time in pretty good condition.  It’s like getting the movie star look on a Wal-Mart budget and people are starting to realize that these vehicles are not going to depreciate in five years like the newer vehicles are doing in a year.  It’s something to think about isn’t it?

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Auto Consultant – John Boyd: The Cool Car Guy
John is an auto consultant who owns CoolCarGuy.com that is a licensed car dealership in Lone Tree, CO.  He can help you save time and money on any make or model, new or used, lease or purchase – nationwide! Call or email John about your next vehicle! jboyd@coolcarguy.com or Twitter @coolcarguy

Hey Cool Car Fans,

I decided to start 2017 off by writing an article about the plethora of car websites online with “information” about getting a deal on vehicles and online reviews.  There is a popular old saying, “there’s a sucker born every minute” and this is really true when it comes to what you read online.  Granted, I have an online blog here, so people could probably say the same thing about me, but the difference is that I am actually licensed to buy, sell, trade and lease vehicles for a living and I’ve been doing it for the past twelve years.

ONLINE REVIEWS

Let me start though by talking about online reviews.  What a joke most of this information has turned out to be.  I know of a dealership that rips people off constantly and they earn a ton of money selling cars.  They “inspect” their cars, advertise their cars as “inspected”, but most of their vehicles are rusted out from the East Coast and they don’t actually fix them.

They just advertise that they have a “90 point inspection” done on the vehicle, which is true, but they don’t pay to repair them.  In some cases, they don’t even do an oil change or they may only do an oil change on the vehicle.  When a person goes back to complain they tell them that they purchased the vehicle “as-is” and to have a nice day.

Some disgruntled people will go and write a bad review about them, but they don’t care.  The salespeople have their friends and family write reviews for them or they write them on their own under an alias.  Their good reviews outweigh their bad reviews, so they look like a great place to buy a car.  How is the online website like Google going to monitor that?  They can’t and do they really care?  Think about it.  The reality is that you could buy a car that is a piece of junk if you buy from that particular dealership based on their reviews.

On the flip side, you see people who are extremely unreasonable write negative reviews about repair shops or car dealerships that are really quality businesses.  I know of a repair shop in Denver that has been around for 40 years and they specialize in doing clutches at a pretty reasonable price.  They will even use upgraded materials like Kevlar that can last longer for only about $100 more than an OEM clutch.

Recently, I read a review online that blew my mind.  Some disgruntled guy wrote…

The quality was excellent–HOWEVER they tried to charge me sales tax on MY components which were brought in for reconditioning, which is labor only. This is NOT legal under Colorado State Law, and they IMMEDIATELY developed an attitude when informed of this fact. Will NOT use them again.

Really? This guy brought in his own parts for “reconditioning” and they charged him sales tax of 7.65%?  I bet his bill was about $200, so he had to pay about $15 in sales tax and he took the time to rate this shop one-star on a popular website.  He even said, “The quality was excellent”.

This guy failed to realize that most shops won’t even let him bring in his own parts.  The repair shops want to use their own parts, so it’s amazing this shop did that for him and then he pounds them online over sales tax?  Wow.  How many people won’t bother reading the actual review to realize that an unreasonable guy gave this long-term shop a one-star rating and they will miss out on using a really good shop for their service.  Once again, I take online reviews with a grain of salt because most of them are B.S.

CAR PRICING ONLINE

Let’s shift gears quickly and talk about one of my favorite things that you will see online today.  There are so many websites now telling people what they should be paying for a vehicle.  And most of the time it’s really comical.  I’m not going to mention the websites directly because I don’t need the heat from their lawyers, but you will know who they are.  The websites that tell you whether you are getting a fair market price or a value price or what the dealer price should be.

I ran an Internet company for three years before becoming The Cool Car Guy twelve years ago.  Guess how we made our money on the Internet?  We sold ads.  And the more visitors we would get to our site the more ads we could serve up and the more ads we served up the more money we made.  Do these sites actually sell cars?  No.  Do they really care if they tell you that you should be paying $25,000 for a $30,000 car?  No.  Why would they?  They have zero risk for giving you poor information.  It’s on the same level as fake news.

These websites often pull data from the dealer auctions for example or previous sales on their website, but that really means nothing.  Does their algorithm that they are using stop to say, “This vehicle had frame damage we need to adjust the price and notify our visitors.”  or “This vehicle was in two accidents and was priced less.” or “This vehicle has $5,000 in hail damage that wasn’t repaired.” or “This same vehicle is missing a front fender and the tires were bald and the sunroof was cracked and leaking water.”? Do their websites take any of this information into consideration?  No.  They can’t!  It’s simply taking an average of all recent sales data and telling the visitor that they should be paying $25,000 for that $30,000 vehicle because they have all the “data”.  It’s ridiculous because the data isn’t completely accurate.

It can’t be because sometimes a dealer will low-ball someone on a trade and the person will take their low-ball offer.  Now, they paid $16,000 for a vehicle that is running through the dealer auction for $22,000 that they can sell for $20,000 and earn $4,000.  Does this now mean that these vehicles that are retailing for $25,000 should be selling for $20,000?  This is the brain damage that these websites are creating in the marketplace because of mis-information and just spitting out “data”.  Ever watch Pawn Stars on television or some of the car shows where someone wants $10,000 for their vehicle and they offer them $5,000 and they take it?  It happens quite a bit nationally, but it’s not reality because some dummy gave away their vehicle.

You get to run around trying to buy a $30,000 for $25,000 and telling the local dealership or a private party, “Website so and so says I should be paying this, so that’s the most I am going to pay.”.  Does website “so and so” own that vehicle you want?  No.  Does website “so and so” actually sell cars or just advertise cars for sale?  How does website “so and so” get paid?  They sell advertisements or you have to pay a fee to list your vehicle on their website.

Are all cars that are the same make, model and year the same?  Ever been in a used car that looked like a family of rats lived in it or was a rust bucket compared to one that is car show worthy?  Are they worth the same?  Do these websites really care if the vehicle sells or if the visitors get the wrong pricing information?  No.  It’s not like you are buying the vehicle from them.  They have absolutely no skin in the game and there are zero regulations to make sure that their information is accurate.

What should you really do to get pricing for a vehicle?  See what the vehicle is really selling for online and if it fits your budget great.  If not,  you probably have to adjust your budget based on the actual condition of the used vehicle.  You are far better off going to NADA.com and KBB.com and pull the data with the options to see what the retail and wholesale value is for the vehicle.  This is what banks use to loan money on vehicles, so it’s much more real data.  If you are under retail and close to wholesale than you’re probably getting a good deal.  You should compare both book values though because sometimes even they miss it.  Some banks use Kelly Blue Book and some use NADA, so if you are financing the vehicle, find out which your lender is using.

In the end, a vehicle is worth what the owner is willing to pay.  A few years ago there was an article about a 1956 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing that was unrestored and it sold at auction for $400,000 more than a restored one brought.  What’s the website that the buyer could have gone to see if he got a good deal on that vehicle?  You can see details on this vehicle purchase at Gooding & Company’s website.

Obviously, the vehicle was worth what the buyer was willing to pay for it.  This is one of the reasons why I often enjoy selling historical or classic cars more than more modern vehicles to clients.  Most of the time the buyers and owners are much more reasonable about the vehicles they are looking to purchase and sell.

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Auto Consultant – John Boyd: The Cool Car Guy
John is an auto consultant who owns CoolCarGuy.com that is a licensed car dealership in Lone Tree, CO.  He can help you save time and money on any make or model, new or used, lease or purchase – nationwide! Call or email John about your next vehicle! jboyd@coolcarguy.com or Twitter @coolcarguy