What Is A "Best Buy" Price, Anyway?

Okay, this is the starting point. You first have to have an understanding of what is a "cheap price" to begin with.

Cars are not like clothing or other products that are retail valued at twice their wholesale cost. The average used car profit at a Dealer is right around $2,000. You can probably add another $1,000 to this figure by eliminating avoidable Dealer costs such as sales commissions, advertising costs, rent and other Dealer overhead items.

This is accomplished, of course, by not buying your car from a Dealer.

The wholesale price is a car's trade-in value. That's what cars sell for at Dealer-Only car auctions. For a consumer, this would be a "great price" for a car. In my opinion, getting this price would make a car purchase "cheap".

Getting even a better price than trade-in would be an "outstanding" buy. This also is possible, but again, it will take some work and patience.

So, a somewhat simplistic approach would be to target roughly $3,000 off of the going retail price. However, for a more detailed explanation of trade-in and wholesale car values, please see this article on used car cash values.