Fleet discount applies to which price?

Transportation, Travel and Trips
1
I visited a Merc dealership yesterday to look at a car I have been eyeing for a while. The salesman told me the fleet discount is applied to the list price (Neupreis on AutoScout), not the price the car is advertised for (Preis).

This surprised me a bit, especially considering the list price is about 15K+ higher.

Nothing was mentioned in the ad about it being a “Tageszulassung” price either.

Can someone confirm fleet discounts are indeed always applied to the list price?

And is there any room for additional negotiation when a fleet discount comes into play? How I understand it, the fleet discount is given by the brand, not the individual dealership.

2
Mine was applied to the list price

3
Everything is negotiable.

I got a "special" discount in the summer on top of the fleet discount.

4

You could also check if you can get a discount via your company. We got a nice one when we bought a new Qashqai since husband’s company gets a discount from Nissan.

5
Yep, list price. Medea Fleecestealer - the fleet discount is what the dealers call the "you work for company X" discount.

It's normally negotiated with the brand, not the individual dealer.

6
That’s the fleet discount (Flottenrabatt) I’m referring to and already getting.

I just wonder if that’s applied to the list price (i.e. the price you get when using the car configuration online) or the price a car is advertised for at the dealership (Lagerfahrzeug).

7
Exactly my thinking. I guess this also means the regular discounts can most likely be negotiated and taken off in addition?

8
Negotiating is always possible, but getting all discounts mentioned in this topic maxed out and combined is likely not going to happen.

9
why not? it has a Tageszulassung and is technically not a new car.

10
Formally it might not be a new car, technically it is 100% equal to a new car. Tageszulassung is nothing else than a bookkeeping trick to meet quota's while the car does not drive a single meter, for the customer there's no difference (unless he has an insurance that offers a discount if customer is the first to have the car on his name.)

Usual practice is that a dealer himself offers a discount for the tageszulassung, but if the manufacturer also offers a discount than he reduces his own discount to get a better profit while the customer still get's what should be seen as a cheap car. Maximising both discounts is often not an option for the customer. Dealers see it as a situation where both should get some of the total profit and not as a situation where the customer should get it all.

I am not saying it's impossible, just that it is unlikely to happen.

11
My (single) experience of buying a new car with a fleet discount was offered by the dealer, not the brand. The dealer was one of the large multi-franchise ones in Basel and applied to employees of one of the large pharmaceutical companies there, needing an authorised signature (i.e. from someone with an official signing authority) to get it.

Yes, it was applied to the list price, which wasn't an issue for me as I was buying a specific limited production new model (Passat R36) which needed ordering and building to customer spec anyway. I did manage to squeeze some extra discounts out of them as well, something less than 5%, IIRC, on top of the 10% fleet discount.

But whether the discount is offered by the dealer or the brand it's always only going to be available if you're starting from the official list price - in effect a 'not quite new' car is already heavily discounted anyway, usually by the manufacture to shift over-production vehicles, so they're not going to double-discount it officially, although negotiation may still be possible.

12
It is not. Besides, fleet discounts are not given for “Tageszulassung” cars.

In my case, the “Preis” is e.g. 100K and the “Neupreis” is 120K, which has caused my confusion on what the fleet discount is applied to. When I asked, the dealership came up with some story about it being a Tageszulassung price (again, not mentioned in the ad), and that they can only give those max 5 times per day.

13
Is the car a tageszulassung or not? If not, it cannot have a tageszulassung price, and it's just a normal discount.

14
It is not, at least not mentioned anywhere. It is priced like any other car you see on AutoScout where the “Preis” and “Neupreis” differs. It is just that when I asked why the fleet discount was applied to the higher figure of the two, the salesman said the fleet discount applies to the list price, not the Tageszulassung price (the lower one).

15
This is so confusing...

16
So you are getting a discount over a higher price than the price you are actually paying. whats the big deal

17
No he's not, he's just doing the usual EF trick of being vague and drip-feeding pertinent information. The dealership is saying, if I understand correctly, that if he were buying a car at the list price they could apply the fleet discount to that price, but that as it's already discounted they won't additionally reduce it by the fleet discount amount.

To quote his figures, he's getting a 120k car for 100k, but then wants to get the fleet discount of (say) 10% on top of that, making the actual price paid only 90k. I wouldn't expect that any dealer would do so.

It's exactly the same when you have sales at any other sort of shop - if you would normally get a discount for club membership or through an employer, union, or whatever, you can't take the (e.g.) 50% reduced price and expect to get your 10% discount on top of it. And many special offer coupons etc. will explicitly state that they cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer, but it's already implicit anyway.

18
You call it vague, while I have stated all relevant information in multiple posts already. To me it’s just as vague, hence why I came here to ask which of the two prices the fleet discount applies to. Especially considering most dealerships explicitly state it when the price concerns a Tageszulassung.

19
But you still haven't actually clarified the situation, which is why some aren't understanding it. Is my summary of the situation in the previous post, which you quoted, correct?

20
Nonetheless there's a very simple answer.

Salesdude decides what discount he wants to give on which price and if you don't like that go somewhere else.