Before you put money down
A dealer quotes you a number and you have no way to tell whether it is ordinary. You cannot see how long that machine has been on their website, whether they have already dropped the price, or what thirty other dealers ask for the same one.
We read the inventory pages dealers publish on their own websites, write down what was there and the date we looked, and keep looking. Then we get out of the way.
1
Counted from the date the dealer published, never from the date we first saw it. A listing that has been up for a year is a listing the dealer would probably rather not still have up. Where a dealer's platform publishes no date, we say so instead of guessing.
2
Every time an asking price changed between two of our reads, with both numbers and the date. We can only speak to what we watched, so every page names the day we started looking. A page that stops showing a price and says “call for price” is recorded as exactly that — it is not a discount.
3
The same year, make and model across every dealer we read, shown only when at least five separate dealers carry it. Below that the honest answer is that we do not know. These are asking prices from dealers' own websites, not what anyone actually paid.
A listing without a VIN is not proof of anything. Plenty of dealer websites simply do not publish identifiers. Plenty of listings are models you order from the factory, which is a perfectly normal thing for a dealer to advertise, and the honest ones say so.
So we publish the count and the date, and we leave the conclusion to you. What a count is good for is knowing which question to ask before you drive over.
Is this exact unit here today, and can I see the VIN?
A machine on the floor has one. A listing might not.
What is the out-the-door number, with every line listed?
Freight, assembly, documentary and reconditioning charges are added after the advertised price.
How long has this one been here?
Some listings carry a published date. We show the oldest one we could read.
Or browse by state. We hold figures for 936 dealers in 50 states today, and we are still reading.