Buying your next SUV can begin as an exciting process, but can grow exhausting with time. Sifting through the quagmire of many resources available for car buying can be daunting. Then, if you contact multiple dealerships, you’ll experience the joys of endless calls and emails.
To stifle these distractions and eliminate the hassles of buying your next SUV, there are some online resources that make the buying process stress free. Best of all, these resources allow you to conduct research, shop for SUVs and more from the comfort of your home.
To begin, here are some things to keep in mind when you are looking to buy your next vehicle:
- What is the purpose for the newer SUV? Is it for family use? Business use? By identifying what the main purposes are initially it will help you focus on the equipment you need the most.
- When you find an SUV you like, what do the experts say about it?
- How have owners’ experiences been? Look for a pattern such as customers encountering the same issue. If you find one it’s a red flag, as it indicates there could be mechanical issues with that model.
- Has the SUV won any awards? J.D. Power conducts an initial quality study where they predict which SUVs are likely to be the most durable over the life of ownership.
Along with answering these questions, here are four online tools to assist you in buying the right SUV.
Car Buying Guide by Consumer Reports
Consumer Reports designed their mobile application to help you through every stage of the vehicle buying process. When you download the free app, you can access its free buying guide, which is full of useful articles on car financing, leasing, learning to calculate the price of the SUV, and trade in advice.
In addition, there are calculators available to help you estimate how much your new SUV will cost whether you finance or lease it. A handy tip is you can save calculators to access later.
Along with this, you can use its pricing tool to find out how much your new SUV should cost. While all of these features are free, there is one area you will have to pay to access. If you want access to its car ratings, you must subscribe to its service. Though the cost is low $2,99 per month, there are many other sites, like ours, where you can access helpful reviews for free.
Overall, this is a great resource if you don’t have much experience buying a vehicle and want to know how the process works. Additionally, with a wide variety of tools and educational resources at your fingertips, you can learn all the ins and outs of what buying an SUV entails.
Carvana
If you want to skip the dealership entirely, now you can. To start, you browse through its inventory of certified vehicles. Next, you select an SUV then use Carvana’s innovative 360-degree tool to explore every detail of the model inside and out.
If you are ready to buy, you can select the terms that are best for you based on down payment and monthly payment preferences. Should you have a model you want to trade in Carvana can provide you with a trade in value in as little as two minutes. Then, when you are ready to buy, Carvana can process the transaction in as little as 20 minutes. How many times have you walked into a dealership to buy an SUV and experienced this level of expedience?
To receive your new SUV, you can have Carvana deliver it to your driveway--charge applies. Another option is to pick up your newer vehicle from the vending machine. Yes, Carvana has a vehicle vending machine. To sweeten the pot, if you don’t live near the area, Carvana will cover up to $200 in plane tickets.
Once you have your newer SUV, you will have seven days to try it out. If it doesn’t meet your expectations, you can return it and receive your money back. If you want to avoid the pressures of negotiating the price or having to deal with sales tactics from dealers, then this is a great option to consider.
TrueCar
Say you’ve completed most of your research and you are confident with the SUV you want to buy. The next question is how much should you pay for it? Instead of haggling with a salesperson over costs, there’s an app that provides the information for you from TrueCar.
How it works is you select the SUV you want to buy. Next, you enter your zip code. From there, you build your SUV based on the specifications you want such as model trim and body color. Once completed, TrueCar compiles an average for what others in your area paid for a similar model.
Armed with this information, you can see which dealers are pricing the models you want fairly. Of course, if you want to negotiate, you now have the tool to do so, which could help you save thousands of dollars on your next SUV.
NerdWallet’s Insurance Comparison Tool
When examining a newer SUV, it’s important to figure out how much it will cost you to insure it. To simplify the process, NerdWallet provides an insurance comparison tool, where you enter in the vehicle information such as year, make, model, trim, and your zip code of residence. From there, it compiles quotes from the leading insurance providers to help you find the most competitive rates. While these are only estimations--you can receive a full quote by visiting the provider--you receive invaluable insight into how much it would cost to insure your new SUV in a matter of minutes.
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