.....if he sells it at list price. :confused:

I just thought I'd ask this as I am thinking of buying a new car soon.

I realise it depends on the type of car. Take Skoda for example, when I bought my Octavia 3 years ago my dealer told me that he only made

The dealer margin from which we make profit is usually around 6% on Skodas IIRC.

We make next to nothing on the actual car usually and are struggling against internet brokers who quite often get pre reg cars and imports and sell them cheaper.

I understood the main retail price is fixed, as is the purchase price paid by the dealer for the car from HO. What the dealer is prepared to seel at comes out of their prfit margin. However, they do have overheads and expenses to cover as well as making a profit.

Some prices they just cant do...and why should they.

We make next to nothing on the actual car usually and are struggling against internet brokers who quite often get pre reg cars and imports and sell them cheaper.

coast2coastcars get you a brand spanker and it comes from the dealer i have no idea how it works but it does :confused:

It is quite often the case that a main dealer will make little or no profit and in some cases make a loss on selling a car, to enable them to receive bonus's from the manufacterer.

Most main dealers these days accept that quite often they will make a loss from there sales departments! They then hope to be able to recoup these losses just prior to the 2 new reg months as people place orders for the new reg's

They also rely on the service and parts departments to return profits during this time to cover overheads and possibly make a small profit.

It costs a great deal of money for a dealership just to open its doors - typically anything from 65k - 100k PER MONTH

I went to a skoda garage last week that was doing cars for trade price, fabia vRS was 11500, isn't that a £1000 off?

Ah the good old days (1988) when dealers made 17.5% (I was working at Lada :eek: car importers as a holiday job.

Now it's about 6% BUT the dealer makes cash from bonus' These are a closely guarded secret - If we knew these we could all go in and negotiate harder. I don't think even some of the sales staff know.

Taking the VRS with a sticker price (with options) of say

I find it hard to believe much profit at all is made on the actual car sale... I reckon most of the dealers profit comes from bonusses for selling cars and from servicing etc.

I'm sure finance deals can be a nice little earner though, and also the likes of car treatments like Diamondbrite.

DiamondBrite is a nice little earner I would imagine, also the hourly rates at some dealerships are 30 quid/hour more than elsewhere in the UK, probably related to both the cost of the premises and local labour, as well as a difference in competition levels etc.

As for pricing - I went for the 'get quotes from the internet and take them to the dealer' to get them down on their initial price. Considering each option has a good markup on it, and we got a lot of options fitted, I worked on the principle that they should be able to keep some profit and chop the rest of the options down to roughly what they are able to get it for.

I'm sure they still made a reasonable markup on it, but yeah, I did get the price down nearer to the broker's prices. I went for the dealer as I feel they did a reasonably good deal, and generally it will mean less hassle if you bought the car from them as well.