New 2014 Trail Edition from Western Slope Toyota
WST is located in Grand Junction, CO. While there are a few other, smaller Toyota dealers within a 2-hour drive, WST is closest to us, and does more business.
When we arrived to look at a Trail Edition that was listed on the WST web site, it wasn't there, and no one seemed to have any knowledge that it ever existed. Crap. Moving on...
We had bought 2 previous vehicles from WST--from the same salesman--who had quit due to health problems. Too bad, as he was good to deal with. Now we had to deal with someone we didn't know.
Our biggest mistake was not selling our trade-in car before trying to work a deal. Trading a car put us at a real disadvantage, as they wanted to give us many thousands less for the car than the 3 common web sites (Edmunds, KBB, NADA) said the car was worth. Never again.
Our second biggest mistake was not using Edmunds (or whomever) to check online for best deals & pricing in the general area. I won't make THAT mistake again either.
A silver TE was found in Denver that had KDSS, Entune/sound system upgrade and a couple of other minor options. It met our needs/requirements, and WST did a "dealer trade" to get the truck. It was driven to Grand Junction, so it came with 256 highway miles on it when we took delivery four days later.
Generally speaking, the deal we finally agreed to was acceptable, but definitely not great. After several trips to the sales manager, we finally got our trade-in's value increased to a somewhat reasonable level, but the dealer refused to budge on the MSRP list price. So we left feeling that we had paid too much, maybe $1000-2000 too much. But, we got exactly what we wanted, and TEs are somewhat hard to find.
Next time we will sell our trade-in locally, and then drive over the mountains to Denver with cash. No more local screw jobs.
