Honestly, if you handle your own financing so that doesn't get mixed into the deal, have a hard and fast value in mind for a potential trade-in, and go to a no-haggle dealer, I'm not sure how it's a nightmare. The experience is probably better buying higher-end cars but if you know what you want, what its price is, and get a bank check for what you owe, there are a lot worse experiences.

The reason a lot of people have bad experiences is that they're trying to buy something that they can't really afford, they need financing, and have a trade-in they want to be worth more than it is and the whole transaction becomes this complicated shell game.

> Honestly, if you handle your own financing so that doesn't get mixed into the deal, have a hard and fast value in mind for a potential trade-in, and go to a no-haggle dealer,

You just described less than 1% of car transactions.

But not 1% of transactions that involve high end buyers and high end cars. As soon as you bring ordinary people and the mass market into the mix many of the "horrible things" inevitably emerge.

Sure you can and do have no haggle dealers who could offer take it or leave it finance options and trade ins. But I wonder how many mainstream car buying customers would consider that an improvement when told "that's what the car costs. Sorry if it doesn't fit your budget."

ADDED: I'm sure the experience of buying a Tesla is nice. But it's nice in the context of people who are not going in with no dollars to put down who want to find a way to get themselves into a Tesla.

I admit that I'm not a typical car buyer. I have no car and no experience in buying cars. What I would like to do is go to a website, pick a new car with reasonable features and see a hard number what it's going to cost me per month/year all in. Instead they make it a very tedious process to roughly come up with a number of how much this car is going to cost me in, say, 5 years and how does it compare to other cars.

Of course I should probably just lease a car but that is not very common where I live and thus prohibitively expensive. But I'd like to see it become more common as right now the risks and costs are quite hard to calculate.

carvana.com looks like they're coming close to this - depending on where you live, they'll deliver to your house/office, bring paperwork, deal with trade in, etc. And point/click on the website for what you want, except it's all used cars - you take what's in inventory. I've considered them for my next purchase, and it will largely come down to what they have onhand when I'm ready.

Isn't CarMax supposed to be no-haggle and no-pressure?

I've never bought from them. Last few cars I've bought from private sellers and I will never go back to a dealer of any kind again.

carmax is. i've got a friend who sell there. it definitely is no haggle, and there's not much pressure (maybe in your head, but really nothing from him anyway).

Their prices are generally a bit higher than an equivalent car somewhere else; that's the price you're paying for not having to concern yourself with haggling.