took the plunge...whoohoo!

[JStieger]

Well after 2 years of browsing this diesel site and others, finally testing an '03, and getting a deal I couldn't refuse, I became a new TDR member and decided to by a new '03 yesterday. All I can say is SWEEEEET! What a night-and-day difference from my soon-to-be sold '95 brand F reliable workhorse gas rig. These are my likes so far in no specific order based on the 500 mile drive back from the dealer:



1) quiet, but can still hear the clatter and the turbo whistle

2) brakes

3) steering

4) 18 mpg at 75 mph

5) letting a rice rocket pull up beside me on a 7% uphill grade at 75 mph and then giving some fuel and pulling away from it and then looking at the speedo and it's already at 85 mph+ and the turbo's a singin'

6) see 1) above

7) see 5) above

8) see 1) above

9) see 5) above



These are what I didn't like so far:



1) Diff fluids were factory low levels as typically reported here, but dealer took care of it in front of me with no problems and no extra $ on my part. My truck was a transfer from another dealer who had "PDI" it...

2) touchy high beam switch - managed to switch from lows to high and back to high in one pull on the lever. I think that was "operator error" though!

3) cup holder by shifter - almost tipped over my coffee mug when shifting to 6th



Before I left the dealer the fleet manager (TDR member by the way) asked if I was going to buy gauges. I said not for a while, but then again read my likes list above 1) 5) 6) 7) 8) 9) list items...

 

[Prairie Dog]

Congrats, you are going to really enjoy this truck.



Scotty

 

[gthiessen]

JULIUS Glad to see you made it home okay. It was a pleasure helping you out on your new purchase of you 03 2500 4x4 lb HO 6spd. Take care Greg Oo.

 

[radar doctor]

NEW TRUCK

Congrads on getting your new truck... Did you get the High Output Engine? I can't wait to order but so far i can't get any dealer down to where i can Buy One. I may have to go out of state on a QuoteI have a 99 that i'm going to advertise on here once a dealer will get in the 35 k area. . Agai thanks for posting i love reading this thing about all the TDR Fans

 

[JStieger]

Thanks! I've been waiting for the last 15 years to buy a diesel. As a kid I loved hearing the big rigs go by with the Jakes on while shifting and such as well as riding along in family friend's diesel pickups and tractors. And now finally my dreams have come true with this HO! I only wish that I had joined the TDR earlier so that I could actively participate instead instead of trying to telegraphically get people to ask the questions I wanted asked!



This is the process I went through to get my good deal. Hopefully it can help you out too! Once I knew I was going to buy an 'O3 I got all the purchase money together and got some pretty close estimates of the annual insurance and DMV registration costs. I then started visiting some local dealerships every Sunday when no one was working as well as checking various dealers current inventory on the internet to observe the turnover of these trucks. If the exact same truck has been sitting there for a few weeks to a month or so I guessed that business might be slow. It helps to take down VIN numbers to track them and it also lets you see how a lot of these trucks are shipped from the factory to help in the buying process later on.



I originally was going to take some days off work to buy around the middle of the last week of February when dealers would be under the sales target gun, when you can make or break a dealer into the next tier of the super secret factory-to-dealer incentives (if they exist at that time), and when the $2000 Dodge cash back was supposed to end. I had done all my research knowing what all the invoice versus sticker prices as well as dealer holdbacks were (3% of MSRP less destination) and was going to send a fax detailing all this to about 15 dealers (the key is to fleet managers only since they deal strictly with moving volume) and then letting them "bid" for my business. (Small and big businesses do this all the time - why shouldn't it work for a private individual?)



Anyhow, I got a "promotion" at work the last week and it just about doubled my workload so it put a monkey wrench into my time-off plans. I had visited some local dealers around here, but their attitude was "take it or leave it". Then I remembered a Bend, Oregon dealer posting on the '03 a while back and he got some flack for it. He wasn't part of my original 15 dealer list. However, since he was in the next state up and I always wanted to visit the area he was at (I was on days off anyway) I decided to hold his claims to account and to fax him and got the truck I wanted for $150 over invoice with the $2000 cash back on top of that. The only thing I didn't have on my fax that the dealer pointed out was the advertising charges, but they basically came out in the wash via the regional discount. Between faxing him, 2 phone calls, a quick look on this TDR to look at a previous post about ad charges and regional discounts, and deciding on the truck took about 1 hour tops. The dealer held the truck aside for me with no $ out of pocket on my part.



I couldn't find a $40/day one way economy car rental (even though expedia.com said that I could!) so I ended up flying up there the next morning. I got at the dealership at 12:30 pm and was on the road back home at 2:00 pm. I was full on expecting some sort of negotiating based on other people's experiences on here, but I was pleasantly surprised that everything was just as the dealer promised - no BS or extra add ons.



I guess that if I didn't get the "promotion" and stuck to my original middle-of-last-week-of-February plan I might have got the truck for invoice or less, since even "at invoice" a dealer can make some profit out of the holdback if they quickly move trucks and/or have low overhead costs. But then I could have been faced with some extra BS, which I don't have time for. There's a certain intangible cost for no BS that is hard to put a price on in my view!



Anyway, I apologize for the long post! Reading the above I guess I should have wrote that "information is key!"