If you buy a Toyota following the Tesla model, where you call and say "I'd like to buy the car you have, for the price you have listed", you will also have a generally good experience.
I wish that was the case. The dealership experience seems designed to maximize the pressure and extract as much value from customers as possible.
My first Toyota dealer experience was offering to buy a car at advertised price, and them refusing/countering with a lease. We just walked out.
Based on that, I waited until Toyota offered pretty good unadvertised discounts and called up a bunch of dealers with an offer/car in mind. I got the car my wife and I wanted for $1k more than my offer, which was I think $9k less than MSRP, and the experience was way better. We only had to sit through the finance departments upsells.
The third sale was paying MSRP at a Lexus dealer and we still were there for almost 5 hours.
Oh yeah, it was on a plug-in prius. MSRP was I think 37K and we paid 28k. It was something like $6k in manufacturer credits because sales had stalled after Toyota ran out of carpool stickers. The dealer only knocked off $3k, and I'm sure they still made money on the sale.
My Toyota experience was okay, but I still needed to sit at a dealership for almost two hours to deal with the paperwork, wait for financing, etc. Tesla allowed me to take care of all of that from the comfort of home.
Buying a Ford was the worst experience I've had with a new car, but that could have been entirely on the dealership.
Yes, they are there all day, until closing time, or longer. Usually, the longer you stay, the more likely you are to buy their car, or give them more money. They control the situation and the incentives are in their favor. This is one reason we loathe car shopping.
