New Australian startup Autogenie is attempting to take the time and haggling out of getting the best price on a new car. The online car buying service brings car dealers to one place, where they propose their best price to buyers. It’s then a simple matter of going with the best offer.
[credit provider=”Holden” url=”http://www.holden.com.au/cars/commodore”]
Autogenie is essentially the consumer arm of Smartsalary; an outsourced salary packaging and novated car leasing company that caters to large corporations and government departments. The new site is aimed at everyday car buyers
Explains the website: “The concept is simple — you tell Autogenie what car you want, the dealers offer you their best price, you get three offers within 24 hours.”
Once a buyer selects an offer, they move right to the purchase process with the price already agreed upon.
If Autogenie is to be believed, their system saves customers an average of $2500 and 20 hours for each new car bought. It also lets you purchase anonymously online without being targeted by dealers or marketers (it says here).
The main issue we can see with this system is that it’s naturally reliant on participating dealers — there are no guarantees that the car you want wont be available at a better price elsewhere. In other words, you’ll probably still need to shop around and compare quotes prior to making your purchase.
Comments
2 responses to “New Car Buying Site Makes Dealers Do The Haggling”
So you mean the drive away price on Ebay or Carsales.com isn’t the best price? ;P
But seriously this isn’t anything new. I’ve used places like Private Fleet who put your inquiry & requirements out to tender, then they go off and use the pricing they have to drive down a dealers price who’s closer to you. Without sounding like an Ad, it saved me both time & money… then again that being said I was the idiot who brought a Mahindra. lol
I love the honesty of your comment “I was the idiot who brought a Mahindra. lol”. I was wondering who would buy such a car. You musn’t be such an idiot to know that you were an idiot when you bought the car – must have been temporary insanity. 🙂
You bought a what?
I used a service like this before, it was ten dollars for them to source it and was approximately 6500 dollars less than the RRP.
I then went back to the dealership, told them what I did and said for them to get my business they will need to knock another 200 off.
They did.
(Then I stupidly bought tinted windows from then, and lucked out when they forgot to install them and they refunded me the money)
Nice to see that there is a shift to getting the consumer what they want. Less games and instead good prices – no different to buying anything else online.
$49 to use the service. Rather expensive if you ask me. I would expect it to be cheaper as I would have thought the dealers would be paying part of that finders fee. Sale for dealer and saving for me.
Our users save thousand of dollars due to our national network of dealers who give us a great deal, we charge a fee as a means to ensure that we only get serious car buyers and we believe it’s fair value when the average customer saves $3,200 on their new car purchase – and also saves a lot of time.
Shiju, everybody wants something for nothing. I can imagine how many requests you would get if it were free or next to free – so many tyre kickers getting prices from you for nothing to then go and get a dealer to match or better it. I agree that its a very fair price.
I find the attitude of Australian retail customers infuriating, they can only see things from their perspective.
No, I dont work for Autogenie though I do run a business so understand the mechanics of running a business and why you cant give something for nothing – even if you are being paid at the back end.
$49 is a bargain to use this service when it saves you thousands.
I’ve used similar services about six times for my car buying over the years. The best deal I got was about $7,200 off a run out model just shy of June 30th. So timing your buy can result in improved results.
As this is Autogenie’s time to shine I am not going to mention any others, but Autogenie will be as good or better given the salary packaging connection and existing reputation with dealers.
Even if you pay $49 to then negotiate a further $200 or more off you are still $151 or more ahead (like Blaket did) and Autogenie have made their money so it’s a win win…
There’s is rarely such a thing as a free lunch, but here for the price of a decent 1 person dinner you can do quite damn well in my book.
Carjoy was a similar new startup that died doing the same thing not long ago. I think car dealers won’t participate or not giving good price etc.
Great to see so many comments about Autogenie – thanks for your interest! We’re really excited to improve the car buying process for both consumers and dealers – we save both sides time and money by getting them to a sale faster and without wasting each other’s time.
Follow us on twitter for more updates! @autogenieau
Question?
After a quick read of your about us; Do you try and upsell your salary packaging service? Do you have your own finance products? and do you also have a car leasing service?
Thanks 🙂
ERM you also forget to tell me up front that after going through your process you also want to slug me $50 – for the privilege!!! …not cool….maybe some up front honesty could add a little more integrity to your business:)
Sorry you had that experience – we do state it on our home page, but it may not be visible to everyone. We charge a fee to make sure we only get serious car buyers. We do not up sell salary packaging products since that is done at an organisational level and also applies only to certain sectors. We do offer finance and insurance since our objective is to make car buying as easy as possible – however we do not tie the purchase of your car to our products, as we with any marketplace the choice is with the customer
The reason dealers don’t participate is the places like private fleet do not pass on the full discount to the customer, the try to retain as much as they can, sometimes charging rrp to the consumer and keeping thousands for themselves.
You will always get the best price from the dealer just negotiate.
As a dealer I will not play their game
As I was advised last Wednesday the major brand i currently work for..advise all the dealers who do take part in these kind of sites will lose their advertising fund also all retail bonuses …will also see changes to new cars on carsales.com
I know a dealer paid a broker over $6000 as a referral fee that was not passed on to the end user. The dealer made very little and the broker made a packet. Although some are reasonable in their dealings, some are not. In the end, the end user pays more than what they can personally negotiate directly with a dealer.