What are my qualifications in blogging about purchasing a car?

Actually, my credentials are two-fold: first, as a consumer, I’ve bought and sold dozens of autos in my lifetime.  My first car was a used 1967 Ford Falcon that had just 10,000 miles on it when I bought it in 1977.  I drove that car through my college years, putting in a rebuilt engine and transmission before selling it 90,000 miles later.  Since 1987 I’ve driven new and used full-size pickups, sports cars, mid-size sedans, and coupes of many domestic and import brands.  Like you I’ve spent countless hours in dealerships trying to hammer out the best deal on cars, wrestling with dealership personnel on pricing, and sweating out the finance process.  I hope you will agree that there is nothing simple or enjoyable about buying a new or used vehicle short of putting the car lot in your rear-view mirror.

Second, I’ve experienced all of this from the other side of the table, as a new and used car salesman for a major brand auto dealership.  For nearly 44 months, from 2006 to 2009, I sold trucks, vans, SUV’s, sports cars, and the like over a variety of brands, import and domestic, including Ford, GM, Dodge, Toyota, Honda, and others, for a total of 352 units sold.  The approximate retail value of all the vehicles I sold was more than $6 million dollars!  Now, that sounds like a lot of cars and money, but truthfully speaking, I was just an average car salesman.  I was nowhere near the top of the sales numbers at my dealership, coming in the top five in terms of units sold only twice in those 44 months.  My average cars sold per month was 8.  During the good sales months I’d move 10 or 12 units out the door, while during a couple of bad months I wouldn’t sell anything.  Putting a goose-egg on the totals board for a month sure was embarrassing to me, not to mention a severe liability for my sales career.  However, every sale I made as well as the hundreds more I didn’t make always taught me a little something about the business.  It gave me an insider’s view of the car sales process, from product knowledge to the nitty-gritty of price negotiations.