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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (78417)	3/23/2000 9:55:00 AM
From: Les H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Internet car prices often wrong - study By Michael Ellis DETROIT, March 22 (Reuters) - Better to trust a car dealer than believe everything you read on the Internet. That's the conclusion of a study which found that new car and truck prices on the Internet, a key source for about half of all vehicle purchases in the United States, overstated the actual price by as much as $888 on average. Consumers who shop for cars through the Internet in order to avoid haggling with a car dealer may be missing out on a better price, said the author of the independent study, Art Spinella, vice president of CNW Marketing/Research. ``Up until recently, people automatically assumed that whatever was online was accurate,' he told Reuters. ``This is kind of a wake-up call for the dot com companies to make sure they get their act together, because consumers won't put up with this stuff.' For example, according to the study, for the Lexus LS400 luxury sedan with six options selected, each of the online sites surveyed except CarsDirect.com tallied an inaccurate manufacturers suggested retail price (MSRP). CarPrices.com, which scored the worst among the online sites, missed the mark by $2,696, the survey said. Several Web sites charged for some equipment which is standard on a vehicle, or improperly allowed option packages to be added. Even the two best known vehicle pricing sites on the Internet, Kelley Blue Book (kbb.com), and Edmunds.com, overstated prices, Spinella said. After comparing the prices of 86 different vehicles, representing 57 percent of all U.S. car sales from every manufacturer and every vehicle segment, the study found that Kelley Blue Book missed by an average of $324, while Edmunds was an average $570 above the actual MSRP. ChromeData, which supplies prices to such Web sites as Vehix.com and AutoTrader.com as well as America Online Inc. (NYSE:AOL - news) and Priceline.com Inc. (NasdaqNM:PCLN - news), finished tops in the survey, but its prices were an average of $84 above the actual figure. A spokesman for CarPrices.com countered that the Web site is undergoing drastic changes that will give it the best pricing in the industry. Co-founder Ahmed Ghouri said the company is currently adding more pricing providers, and in something like a reverse auction, dealers will bid for the lowest price to sell a vehicle. Kelley Blue Book editor Charles Vogelheim also took issue with the study, which criticized his Web site for allowing a package with a natural gas engine to be added to a Ford Crown Victoria for an additional $935, when that configuration is not offered by the manufacturer. The Web site says that the package is not available with the Crown Victoria, Vogelheim said. However, Spinella said some of the web sites buried product information in a slew of industry jargon, and if the study's focus group was confused, then the buying public will also make the same mistakes and pay. Conversely, CNW compared actual prices to those at three different dealerships around the country for each of the 86 models, and in every case except one, they matched. ``The dealers are the most accurate because they are dealing with the manufacturers,' Spinella said. Until recently, dealers would never discuss the invoice price, the amount they paid the manufacturers for vehicles. Finding the invoice price was the reason many consumers flocked to the Internet in the first place, giving them an edge in give-and-take negotiations. But in an about-face, the industry group National Automotive Dealers Association (NADA) will launch next month an Internet site (www.nadadealers.com) which will include the invoice price. ``It's sometimes a web of confusion (on the Internet),' said NADA spokesman Michael Morrissey. ``Our goal is to create the definitive source for automotive shoppers.'