[twowheels]

Question for those saying it's unethical...

I recently bought a new car. I basically knew which car I wanted without a test drive, but I test-drove a few anyhow.

1) Test drove the exact car I ended up buying -- originally wasn't planning on quite so many features... at a dealership that was convenient at the time.
2) Test drove a competing car, just to be sure... knowing I was very unlikely to buy it.
3) At another dealership, convenient at the time, I test drove the same car as #1, but base-model with manual transmission to see how it compared. Also test drove a few other similar options.

In these I was either putting miles on their cars and sometimes taking a salesman's time, especially if he went for the drive. As for specialty knowledge -- well, that's a joke -- the sales droids don't know the first thing about their cars and I knew more after 2 hours of online research than they did.

When I was finally ready to purchase (almost 2 months later, meaning that one of the sales-boys [he was young] was on the hook e-mailing me almost weekly for that entire time) I sent out a bunch of e-mail basically saying "your website says you have this car in stock... I'm mailing every dealership... whoever makes this the best experience for the best value gets the sale"... sales-boy from dealer #1 responds and the first line says "We do not play any games when it comes to price so ill be completely transparent with you."... I knew where that was going... I ended up getting the car for $1200 under invoice at another dealership that hadn't spent any time with me test-driving it, about an hour from home. $1200 under invoice was about $2000 better than the next best offer.

So... to those who are saying it's unethical to buy online... I basically bought this car online after looking at the cars at dealers closer to home... what's your take on it?

Edit: I won't be offended... call me out! (within the guidelines of the forum, of course)