Worked for me! Here's my experience and tips. Carwow makes it easy for dealers to bid for your business. It's great for dealers without a big local market. Companies like Carwow make the entire UK mainland their local market. I found Carwow by chance in Sept, put in a few cars A7 biturbo, XF, AMG GT, SL400, S350d helping me make up my mind. In all cases the maximum 5 dealers came back to me per config. Once I'd decided on the model, it was a matter of options and it took me a few rounds (config, 5 offers) to nail what I was really happy with. I felt a bit bad about this refining of what I was looking for as the dealers (many of them giving me back offers for every config) would have to do more, I reckoned, than just press a button. But a couple of them reassured me it wasn't a problem and they were happy to keeping giving me offers (presumably til I accepted one of them!). It is great dealing with the dealers via the Carwow interface, which is basically webmail. It is very slick and reliable in my limited experience. At any time you are free to call the person up you are dealing with. Some of the dealers have dedicated sales people for Carwow and, I guess Carwow's competitors. Partly I went for the greatest discount I could get in the model I had settled on, an S-class. (aside: A friend in the know assures me that I'm the first person he's heard of buying one as it's usually companies in the UK. But I wanted, for once in my life, the very best four door saloon, I could afford.). The retail cost was around £83k, inc £13k options. The deal I agreed was for £60k finance or £65k cash (similar £5k difference another member mentioned above). That's a huge saving for me and the clincher. AMG Line Premium Plus with virtually every option ticked except anything special for the rear seats - I didn't want it to be a chaffeur car in any way - this is a keeper - and also went non-LWB. To get a handle on prices, know that there are two discounts going on here. The one from M-B and the one from the dealer. The M-B one can be estimated by the offers on the M-B website. e.g. S350d was iirc £70k base, with £16k off when financed via PCP. So this is your starting point. The dealer has to (a) better that at a minimum and (b) competitive with the other offers from dealers via Carwow or local/favourite offers matching. In my case the local dealer I'd first walked into really wasn't interested in giving me prompt offers on an S class or AMG GT (I was happy to keep on dealing with the first sales guy I met who gave me an E220d test drive, my first in an M-B, I thought it would help us both, but I guess he had to OK every little thing via the S-class guy). Also the three regional dealers I contacted didn't have S class handy for a test drive either,. So YMMV on local price matching. When you get your actual written offer from a dealer, it takes a bit of arithmetic to figure out how and how much this car is going to cost you and whether or exactly matches the quote given to you. Some dealers did not give me a proper M-B printed quote breakdown (PDF by email or via Carwow file sharing) - the ones that did though we the ones that made it on my shortlist. For some dealer proximity is important. I was concerned about that but was assured that any warranty work would be undertaken by any M-B main dealer, no problem. And my local dealer will be fine for servicing. The last things to add are distance selling and PCP. In the UK distance selling offers the buyer, greater protection than if you walked in the showroom. This happy coincidence means if you do buy from a dealer by phone and/or email, without stepping in there at all *and* you buy via PCP, you may choose to return the car for a refund within a pre-defined time or pay off the finance within 14 days (ie you end up paying the whole purchase price in cash, without significant penalty) Remember the PCP price is about £5k less than the cash price. And if you do end up going through the PCP and paying the residual value you would end up adding about £5k in interest - matching the original cash price. If not made it clear why this is advantageous, in simple terms if your car is, say, £40k cash, but you can't afford that, but can afford the £35k PCP price, knowing you'll end up paying another £5k interest spread out over the years, but a few days after picking up your lovely new motor, you had a windfall, meaning you can now pay it all in cash, you'd settle the outstanding PCP loan and residual - meaning you end up paying £35k cash - and of course no interest to speak of. Voila! Most customers don't have windfalls, so the car finance companies do very well out of PCPs and sell more cars because of them. Hope that helps!
