I picked up a used 2007 Prius about 3 weeks ago, got a good deal on the vehicle. Same dealership now has 2007 base models for $25,995!!!!!! And they are getting that for the cars....wow. New ones are so far waitlisted folks are paying the ransom.....:ballchain:
This is reminiscent of 2004/2005 when there was a shortage and people were paying above sticker. Like you, I got lucky with timing. Big difference is that in 2004 gas was "up" to $2.50/gal.
Not to mention the dropping value of the US dollar has forced japan to up the price of the prius to compensate (due to the stronger Japanese Yen).
My wife and I got lucky in the timing department, too. We had researched the Prius for several months, test driving vehicles at several local dealerships, and finally decided to make the plunge in August of '05. We'd mostly settled on working through one particular dealership and were on the way into Salt Lake to buy the car when, last-minute we decided to call one of the competing dealerships one last time so our confidence factor would remain high. Luckily, that last-minute call opened up an offer for $1,200 less than the dealership we had intended to buy from. We gave the original dealership the chance to match the new offer and after an hour of waiting around the sales floor were turned down. No worries. We jumped in the car and called the second dealership and told them to start the paperwork. From start to finish, our Prius purchase took less than one hour and we saved $1,200 off the sticker price in the process. It turns out that the second dealership was trying to chip away at the sales numbers from the first dealership and so was willing to take a hit to their profit margin to do it. The thing is that we were able to get two dealerships working against one another, even during a time when dealers nationwide were commanding premiums beyond sticker prices. Search for deals (even if you'd have to go out of state to get one) and then ask your local Toyota dealership to match it, or at least get close to it. I never would have guessed that it would happen in our Prius shopping experience, given the fact that people were paying a premium for the privilege of buying the car at that time, but it did. Shop around. Now the icing on the cake... Exactly one week after taking ownership, hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast. Fuel prices went through the roof (well, it seemed like $3 gas was completely insane back then...) and we both breathed a sigh of relief as we passed fueling station after station in our Prius. We've been "high-fiving" each other ever since. Timing is sooooo important in many things in life.
