Evolution of the Tesla Trade In (or Sanity Check Please)

[lolachampcar]

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[breser]

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Well you've peaked my interest.

 

[gpetti]

I just thought of a point regarding "courtesy trades" that might explain why it wouldn't be offered in Alberta. In Alberta if someone buys a used car from me, they don't pay GST (fed tax) or any provincial tax. I think that if I did a courtesy trade, then Tesla would have to collect GST from the third party (5%), making it unattractive for the third party unless the price was dropped to a level where it probably wouldn't make sense to me. As far as I can tell, in Ontario a dealer sale or a private sale would each collect HST. Just doing some quick math, I think it could work (where the buyer pays less than my current asking and I still get more than the Tesla offer), but it only provides a marginally better offer than the current Tesla offer.

 

[TSLA Pilot]

While we have plenty of data regarding the low ball trade-in offers for Tesla vehicles in this forum, I have not heard much about the other cars in general. Are the trade-in offers for non-Tesla (i.e. ICE) cars competitive? Does anyone think that the wholesale dealers that Tesla is working with also reduce their offers knowing that there is a sale tax offset? I've heard that Tesla is working with multiple wholesale dealers now (not just Auto Nation). In theory, this should yield a more competitive offer for the customer, but I have not seen any evidence for it one way or another in this forum. Does anyone have any personal experience they can speak about?


-- Edit --



There are several large online dealers such as Starwood Motors and Earth Motors who are particularly familiar with Teslas (just check out Cars.com for their listings). You can give them a call. All I did was spent an afternoon taking my car to the local luxury car dealerships just for a quick comparison. Keep in mind that my local dealers knew very little about Teslas and uniformly expressed misgivings about buying an expensive "niche" car for resale, they still offered me nearly $9,000 more than Tesla. Sad, isn't it?

Yes, our ICE potential trade-in offer was also remarkably low.

Imagine being offered $22k (IIRC) for our very late-production, still under factory warranty, 2011 BMW 335i with only 22k miles, well equipped with Sport Pkg (and "Perf Edition" factory power boost as well), Conv Pkg, HK Sound, Park Distance Control, Cold Weather Pkg, Comfort Access, etc. Somewhat similar to this car, except ours has half the mileage and about $7k in additional options (and an original MSRP of over $50k):

2011 BMW 3 Series 335i Coupe For Sale - USA - CarGurus

Thus, our trade-in offer from Tesla was easily $4k to $5k shy of wholesale.

Same game--as a "sales tax hostage" in a state like Texas (where we are credited for sales tax on our trade in), Tesla is able to take advantage of its customers for short-term gain, but creating a reservoir of ill-will that may come back to haunt them later.

The difference with our Tesla MS trade-in is that I (as in "me") had found a buyer ready, willing, and able to buy our 3-week old MS for ~$79k and Tesla Motors refused to do the paperwork shuffle to sell it to this In-Tesla's-network dealer offering ~$79k, preferring instead to screw us for the extra $4k--because they could....

Nice!

If there was any other way to avoid the shaft, say by going to a different Tesla "dealer," we'd have been long gone.

**The problem is that there are no other Tesla "dealers" as Tesla Motors owns and controls all of the franchise locations in a monopoly fashion. I can easily see NADA using these examples of customer abuse in their various lawsuits. If Tesla Motors begins to lose more of these cases, they will only have their own behavior to blame.**