I'm in the market to buy a new '08 Audi A3. Two days ago, I emailed thirteen dealerships in three geographic regions--Colorado, Dallas, and Houston--to request bids.

Eerily, exactly one dealer in each region has responded to me with bids, and they all responded within 2 hours of their AM opening time after I sent the email around midnight. Everyone else has ignored my email. I sent a second email to the non-responders yesterday, and still no response from any of them.

Is this coincidence? I suspect some form of collusion. In particular, I suspect that my "case" was assigned to exactly one dealer in each region, and everyone else in that region was told to back off.

Has anyone else had an experience like this?

EDIT: I should mention that I used the BCC: (blind carbon copy) field for every email address, so they can't read off who is receiving my messages so easily. Still, I suspect that all the dealers within a region are in communication, and they have some system to assign email clients to only one of them at a time.

 

zlguocius - personally, I never use the BCC function when contacting someone. If I receive such an email I usually dismiss them. If you write to me asking me something and it says "Dear Sir" or "To whom it may concern" the chance of me responding to this is close to zilch. My recommendation is to visit one of the local dealership that has not responded and ask for one and telling then they did not respond. Try to find out who the sales person is for the internet and talk to him. Some dealerships have special deals for online only.

Side note, from another post, I remember that you are looking for a 3.2. If that is correct, my local dealership was not opened to negotiation on it, you take it or leave it sort of deal. It may add to the problem you experience.

 

The two Audi dealerships in the Denver area competed pretty aggressively for my business. I was even up front with them about who I was dealing with. Did you send emails via Audi's website or individually from your email account? Most likely your account since you were able to BCC. So I don't think it was a matter of Audi USA assigning it to a region or specific dealer.

Olivier may be right or it was coincidence that they have not replied. Might have been busy.

 

Thanks for the feedback, jnikom and olivier. In retrospect, I should have sent thirteen individually addressed emails, rather than one form email via the BCC field. But it's too late for that.

Still, I've tried multiple followup ways of getting bids out of the non-responders, with no luck. It's also suspicious that some of the non-bidders will actually email me and chat a bit, and say they'll "get back to me" once they crunch the numbers. But then they don't. I even remind them a day later, and my email gets ignored.

Anyway, I did a little more snooping around the internet, and the specific form of collusion I suspect is called bid rigging. I have a pretty high degree of belief that Audi dealers practice some form of this.

As a last resort, I may call a couple of dealers to request bids over the phone, though I've heard they don't like to talk hard numbers on the phone. I may even show up at some of the ones close by and try to get a quote that way.

What an irritating experience--I hate buying a car. (I'm not looking forward to house-hunting this fall... [:'(])

 

I thought there was nothing worse than buying a car, but my wife and I have been looking for a house for a little while now and the house hunting experience is much worse... I would buy a car anyday! So double good luck for you, you will need it.

Insofar that the Audi is concerned, definetelygo to a couple of dealership that did not respond and have a face-to-face conversation so you can compare.

 

Thanks for the replies, everyone. I've been able to get bids from a few other dealers, including two-ish in the Colorado region, but only after sending them personal emails and in a few cases cold-calling them.

So I no longer think they are colluding. Rather, I now think it's a combination of (1) spam filters on mass emails and (2) not wanting to bother with internet sales, which I'm guessing are a lot more work and a lot lower margin than the rich, lazy, and ignorant who just walk in off the street and buy on impulse.

Thanks for your help everyone. I'll post some comments on the dealers with whom I dealt after I make the deal, with any luck within two days.

 

zlguocius (try to say this 3 times fast!) - if you have not done so, you should check thisthread and this one since this person (same for both threads really) is buying an A3 right now and you can see comment from other people that have bought their A3 lately.

Good luck to you and keep us posted.

 

Thanks for the links, olivier. I've seen those threads, and I think I even posted on one of them! I've been scouring this very useful forum for tidbits that might help me, and I've learned quite a bit. I'm going down to a dealership this afternoon with the intention of signing a contract, though because it's a pre-order the car won't be here until ~August at earliest. I'll post more details and thoughts and so on as the story unfolds.

Thanks again!