Dealer experience - Ira Toyota Manchester NH

Well, this is my first Prius (and this is my first post at PriusChat). I just bought a White 2006 w/ package 7 (everything but the leather). I'm liking it now, but I had honestly gone in to buy a Camry Hybrid yesterday. As luck would have it, they had just sold their last one (as luck would have it, that was about the third time that happened to me... guess I wasn't supposed to buy a Camry Hybrid?).
For the most part, the experience was typical at the dealership. Plenty of friendly stuff to show why they are such a great place to buy and then some of the usual sales stuff during the numbers game. Not half as bad as a few things I've read on here already (I guess it wasn't so bad...), but for me a bit annoying. I had to really fight with them to give me fair trade in value on my 2003 Echo. They pulled a CarFax and showed me it had been in an accident before I had bought it (used 2 years ago from Grappone Toyota in Bow NH). I hadn't known this, but I was pretty convinced it was just fine (come to find out after the sale, I was cleaning out the glovebox and found the original "Toyota Certified Used Car" sticker... guess it couldn't have been too bad after all). Obviously the way the Prius cars sell... they weren't budging on MSRP, which was a new experience for me.
Unfortunately my Echo had been acting up and I didn't feel like fixing it (then I would have ended up keeping it another year and I had convinced myself I wanted a new car), this was the last Prius they had (I wanted a Hybrid before 9/30) and it had stuff I didn't really want (but now that I have it...they are pretty damned cool) but I didn't want to risk ending up with nothing (Camry Hybrids have been near impossible to nail down around here and the Prius is moving lickety split too). So... I signed. In the end I got just under Kelly "fair condition" value for my trade in(which is fair, as it will need a repair) and I rolled the extra I still owed on to the financing. The car sold for MSRP, so I guess by what I read here, that isn't so bad. The financing rate was OK, I had already locked in pre-approval with a Credit Union, so I had a backup plan. I bought an extended warranty and GAP insurance because I plan on keeping this thing till it's paid.
That's about it, thanks for listening. In short, the dealership and the pricing was OK. Might be better out there, I'm sure there are certainly worse.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(PA @ Sep 17 2006, 09:09 AM) [snapback]320787[/snapback]</div>

Good point, I didn't mean to make it sound so negative. I had thought about the Prius, but I think I had simply written it off as a hybrid version of the Echo and I had found the Echo "not so comfortable" for my long commute. Once I actually sat in it and test drove it, I had overcome those objections. I suppose the fact that I had a two door Echo really lent to the cramped feel, the extra two doors seem to make a world of difference (especially since parked side by side, the Prius was just a little bigger than my Echo)