The Mrs & I will shortly be buying a new Toyata Rav4 2.0 VX. I have sourced a UK broker (drivethedeal.co.uk) who shows the price for the car well below the lowest that I can get the local Toyota dealer down to.
I have searched the archive of the HJ site and see various posts re this type of deal, however I guess that it doesn't do any harm to raise the issue once more and get a more up to date picture on this subject.
Has anyone experience (good or bad) of using such brokers, and also any pitfalls to be aware of? The car is to be UK supplied and the deal will be between me and the UK dealer that the broker will put me in touch with.
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www.drivethedeal.com don't do part exchanges as a general rule. This may or may not matter to you. Obviously the individual dealer is free to make an exception, but don't expect the p/x price to be much good.
Oh and www.ukcarbroker.co.uk may actually be cheaper still (certainly is for a 2.0 VX 5 door petrol) but their prices don't necessarily include delivery. Or you could get lucky and find that the dealer is only 50 miles away anyway.
Finally, there are no obvious financial or legal pitfalls. Obviously it's possible that your dealer won't take too kindly to missing out on the business, but there is loads of money in servicing a car (a 10k service can be just an oil and filter change, plus a visual inspection, for £180) so I think they should be able to get over it.
Otherwise, there is no reason why the deal should be any more or less painful than with your local dealer, if the money is paid directly to the dealer, not the broker.
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Sorry to do this here - did you get my email David? - Dan
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Thanks for the info.
I don't need p/x for my existing car as private sale is being lined up. I get the rav4 2.0 petrol VX manual showing £177773.50 from drivethedeal & £17899 from ukcarbrokers - do you get different figures?
The only pitfall that I can see is delivery. If it is not included and the supplying dealership is in say Cornwall (I am in central Scotland) this may be a bit of a pain. But I guess that a weekend trip away with the Mrs to pick up our new vehicle would not be such a bad thing !! ;-)
I would have no hesitation in using a broker over the local dealership as far as OTR price goes, and as you say the local will still get the servicing business from me. And I would happily point out to the sales manager that they (local dealership) lost out on initial purchase business due to their lack of competitive price.
Again thanks for the advice DavidHM,
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I get £18128 today but if you've got an offer from the dtd dealer, they'll probably stick to it. It's possibly related to my postcode (I'm in London).
Oh and don't be too hard on the local dealer over the price. When you buy through a broker, you effectively count as a fleet customer, so there's every chance that you've had a good deal, retail, but you simply don't have to pay retail.
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A trip to Cornwall is unlikely.
When I was shopping around the brokers for my new car they all said they sourced from the north of England because they could get much better prices than in the south.
I live in Bournemouth and my car was delivered from Lancashire.
The only downside from not buying localy was the 260 delivery miles. Not an issue personally because I've done 8000 miles in the two months I've had it.
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I bought my car via ukcarbroker. The transaction was very smooth and I collected my car (the garage sent someone to pick me up) two weeks after ordering. I was lucky that the garage was only 25 miles away. They told me that they did a lot of business with the broker and delivered all over the country.
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I have no connection with them but relatives have bought cars from Carfile www.carfile.net and found them to offer good prices - although others to try are autobytel www.autobytel.co.uk and broker4cars www.broker4cars.co.uk. (As well as others mentioned in th deals news on this website)
(Make sure you get a quote for the reg plate you want - you'll get a cheaper price if you can live with a 03 plate instead of the 53 plate I guess)
I was pretty sure that Carfile, Broker4cars and UKcarbrokers offered free delivery to your door on a transporter for Toyotas - not sure about the others...worth checking as obviously that's preferable to getting it driven by a delivery driver!
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