[ubermonkey]

Owing to an affection for horsepower and some fortunate professional choices, I spent a long time driving higher-end cars (mostly from Germany).

The dealer experience when buying a BMW, say, is astonishingly easy and reasonable (IME) vs. the same process of visiting a "normal" dealer. I knew this intellectually, but when we were looking for a new car a few years ago, after I had "recovered" from my sports car mania, we looked at several conventional dealers including Ford and Mazda.

Holy CRAP those experiences were AWFUL. I mean just TERRIBLE. Creepy dealers who clearly thought they were going to put one over on us, skeevy and hamfisted attempts to rush a sale, the whole nine yards. It's just BANANAS that this persists.

(For the record, we ended up with a VW. At the time, it was kind of right after the whole scandal, and they were fairly motivated to sell cars, which worked to our benefit. And the GTI is a hell of a lot of fun while being (a) cheap and (b) practical. No word of it a lie, driving it is at least 80% as much fun as driving my old 911 was.)