OTD Pricing/First-Time Car Buying Experience
I wanted to share my purchasing journey for anyone who might benefit from seeing some actual OTD numbers I was offered along the way. I feel like I got a pretty good deal after shopping around at multiple dealerships. I personally would have benefitted from seeing something like this as this is my first time purchasing a new vehicle and was desperately searching for recent OTD numbers to guide me to the best deal. I hope this ends up being helpful for someone!
If you don’t want to read any further, I’ll give a quick breakdown of my recent purchase (May 2026):
New 2026 Mazda CX-90 Preferred MHEV
MSRP listed: $44,830
Selling price: $40,828 (9% off MSRP)
Total Savings (all dealer, no customer cash): $4,002
OTD: $44,000
For added context, I was primarily shopping for deals via email and text with dealers in South-Central PA and Northern MD. In total, I believe I got pricing from 9 dealers.
The dealer, who is local, also threw in some service incentives like free oil changes, tire rotations, and inspections to sweeten the deal. This is what put me over the edge in choosing them over a dealer further away that they were matching at $44k.
I elected not to take the customer cash after crunching the numbers with the rate I was pre-qualified for through Bank of America (5.24% for 60 months). I qualified for the 0.9% for 60 months so it was a no-brainer.
As far as getting my offers goes, I pretty much just followed the general guidelines of many YouTubers and car-buying experts and just got multiple offers and shopped them around until I felt like I couldn’t go any lower. My first “best offers” were around $45.5k OTD and I just kept working myself down from there. I think my best offers all the way down to purchasing were $45.5k > $44.6k > $44.3 > $44k
For this region, I had two offers at $44,000, and two at $44,300 who wouldn’t go any lower. That was a good indication to me that I probably wasn’t getting a much better deal anywhere else.
I also did my best to cut down on back and forth with salespeople by just coming right out and explaining that I planned on financing through Mazda so they didn’t throw that $2000 customer cash into the pricing. Maybe that’s obvious, but it took me the first two offers to get the hang of what to say.
If anyone has any questions, I would be more than happy to answer them as best as I can!