The Scrumgineer

Lessons from Navigating the Car-Buying Process as an Insider

The car-buying process can be rough. Even today, finding the right car for you and getting it at a reasonable price can seem daunting. I’ve been at TrueCar for six years, working in Software Engineering, and I just bought a new car in December 2024. I will walk you through my experience, share some tips, and highlight areas I think are ripe for innovation.

Until a large pothole on the 405 highway, we drove a 2011 Mazda 3 lovingly nicknamed “Iggy”. It was a solid car that my partner bought new and had put 165,000 miles on. We vowed to drive it into the ground and did just that. The pothole took out the tire and mangled a tie rod joint. The hour-long tow home gave us plenty of time to let the next steps sink in. And thank goodness for AAA, that would have been a very expensive tow. Once we got home, it was on to the next adventure: finding a replacement.

Finding the right car

There are hundreds of different vehicle models and thousands of different styles. How do you find the car that best fits your life? TrueCar has a good resource called the Find Your Fit quiz. It will walk you through some basic questions to help narrow the field. This is a quick way to get some starter ideas. Reddit also has a community dedicated to exactly this task called WhatCarShouldIBuy.

Using these I narrowed it down to a few popular contenders: the Toyota Rav 4 Hybrid, Kia Sportage Hybrid, and a Subaru Forester. The TrueCar comparison tool did a great job highlighting key differences.

Of course, spreadsheets and specs can only get you so far. There are some things you can only learn from driving a car. Perhaps your elbow lands right in the cup holder, or the inside door handle is so far forward that closing the door on a hill requires Hulk-like strength. Some of these annoying aspects of a car might not even be noticeable during a quick test drive.

Enter Turo, the car-sharing platform, where we found a RAV4 we could rent for a few days. We took it on a weekend road trip and noticed a few things I never would have noticed in a test drive. I highly recommend finding a way to drive cars for more than a few minutes. Check out Turo, borrow a friend’s car, or look at traditional rental agencies. When you run out of rental options, you can always rely on test drives at a dealership.

Before heading out the dealerships for test drives, I went to the TrueCar Deals page just to see what Finance and Lease deals were available. I wanted to see if there were any low interest rates for the trims I was interested in. This is an area I think we can lean more into at TrueCar, I think there are a lot of shoppers like me that want to be able to search for the vehicles that have the best APR or highest amount of cash back this month. Our Deals page is decent, but it could be better integrated on our search page.

I found there was a really good lease cash incentive for the Kia Sportage Hybrid Plugin. We decided that was going to be the next car we test drove and price shopped.

Price shopping

I went through the “Build and Price” flow and found that for the trim I wanted, the MSRP was $45,785. The average deal in my area? $45,052. Basically, people were paying full MSRP for this vehicle.

A lot of people think you need to click “See Offers” and actually have TrueCar send your information to a dealer before you see any real valuable price information, but this average is very useful and I haven’t entered any personal information yet. This gives me a good benchmark to start with. If you click the graph icon, you can even see a breakdown of recent transactions.

Now I follow through and submit a lead to my local Kia dealer and get shown matching vehicles in their inventory. I get a great price breakdown of all the fees, taxes, and accessories. This is something I think TrueCar does well; very few of our competitors give this level of detail in the price breakdown. I may be a bit biased here since I work on the teams that built and maintain our pricing engine.

In this detailed price breakdown you can also see all dealer installer accessories. I noticed Lojack is listed for this vehicle, and that’s not something I need, so I made a note that I’m going to ask the dealer if they can remove that.

We made an appointment and went for a test drive the next day. After a quick drive and a demo of all the cool tech features, we left feeling like we had found our car. Within an hour of leaving, the dealer emailed me over deal numbers covering a few different lease terms, down payments, etc. They generated these from their own pricing software rather than using the tool we have in TrueCar for dealers. I wasn’t a fan of the format of the prices they sent me, it wasn’t very easy to read.

I compared the numbers that he emailed me to what I was shown earlier in TrueCar and it looked the same. He was able to credit me back the price for the LoJack install.

Closing the deal

I sent the salesperson a text two days later and told him we wanted to move forward with a lease on the Sportage. I included all the details about how many miles, term length, down payment, etc. I asked if he was around today and suggested meeting at 10 AM. He asks to push it back an hour to wrap up another customer he has. Not a problem.

We get to the dealer at 11 AM and then starts our 3 hour adventure. Not a fun adventure, we didn’t get a tour, we didn’t meet the skipper, we just sat there for almost an hour waiting for various people.

The first issue I had was the price breakdown he showed me. It didn’t match the numbers he had sent earlier. And then just for an extra punch in the face, the format had completely changed, it looked nothing like the last breakdown. So now I have the fun job of trying to compare them and figure out what’s different. It turns out he didn’t use the numbers I sent in the text, he ran it with a different term and down payment. There was also a paint protection accessory listed but he was quick to mention he was going to knock the price of that off as well as the LoJack.

After reviewing all the pricing, we never arrived at the exact number we had before. I think we were off by about $100, but I don’t want to sift through everything again and argue over $100 on a $50,000 car. When dealing with something like this, you have to consider what your time is worth. Is it really worth spending extra hours at the dealership fighting over something that amounts to less than 1% of the total cost?

Next, we had to review and sign a ton of paperwork: lease agreements, title transfer, etc. Before I came in, I had asked if there was anything I could sign online in advance, and they told me no. This is another opportunity I see for improvement; in our recently launched TrueCar+ (a service for buying a car entirely online), we allow users to sign all documents online. We are working to expand that service to more dealers, and I can’t wait. It would have been so nice to sign all this from the comfort of my own home.

I often hear horror stories about the hard sell in the finance office, where they pitch you a ton of protection products. However, we didn’t encounter any of that. In fact, they didn’t even mention any of the products. They were available, but they didn’t try to sell them to us at all. Whether that’s because they were busy or because I’m a TrueCar employee, I can’t say. One optional product I do recommend to people is GAP insurance; given how expensive cars are these days, it’s definitely worth it.

Two and a half hours in, and the paperwork is finally complete. Now, we’re just waiting for the car to return from detailing. After a final walk around the car to check for any issues, we will be on our way home in our new car!

Now, a month later, we still love it. Modern cars with all the fancy bells and whistles are a big step up from our stick shift. This Kia almost drives itself.

After the purchase, a co-worker reminded me about https://leasehackr.com/, so I went there and entered my deal information to see how it compared to others. I was happy to learn that some other folks in my area essentially got the same deal, so it’s just another confirmation that I didn’t get ripped off. And really, that’s all I was looking for.

Final thoughts

1. The car buying process still has pain points.
2. The TrueCar comparison tool is useful for comparing vehicle specifications and quickly highlighting differences.
3. Turo and other car rentals are essential for discovering all the quirks of a car that you might miss during a quick test drive.
4. The Deals page is a great way to find out what incentives are available.
5. Don’t get caught up in trying to find the absolute best deal; value your time and pay what everyone else pays.
6. I feel reinvigorated by the work we are doing at TrueCar; there are still many areas where we can enhance the car buying process.

My final piece of advice may be the most important: Utilize your memberships. Car companies frequently offer special incentive programs that aren’t available to the general public, only to specific membership groups like AAA or Navy Federal. It’s not uncommon to see $5,000 incentives. As I write this, Mercedes is offering a $5,500 rebate for certain models. Military members also receive some fantastic deals. So, check your emails for mentions of car buying programs, or simply search “truecar” along with your membership name, e.g., “truecar sams club.” The landing page typically outlines any special rebates available for that month. Sadly, there were no private incentives for my Kia, but hopefully this will help someone else.