Best Dealership in the Sound

I have also found Lake City to have the best local prices in the area. Even better than Amazon OEM Toyota parts. And you know that the Lake City parts are legit OEM.

I'm curious that Toyota of Seattle is not mentioned anywhere in this thread. Is it because of the Seattle taxes? I did not get my truck there, but we did purchase our Sienna from there back in 2016. They had the lowest price around in the immediate Seattle area (including burien, renton, bellevue, bothell, kirkland, and edmonds) for in stock inventory. Back then, they had set a low non-negotiable price that no one else could beat or match. I'm not sure if they still do that today. My wife likes their Service Dept. a lot, but she doesn't research like me. They're probably not the cheapest, but they have been honest with her and great customer service, and no pressure either. We have a great auto service shop (non-toyota dealer) here in West Seattle that we frequently compare with. I tried Honda of Seattle (same place, but other side of the building and different people) for my previous Honda and that place was absolutely horrible.

I got my truck used from AutoNation in Bellevue. On some recommendations of good friends that buy and sell cars, I used CarGurus.com to find my Taco.

I need to get some routine maintenance service done soon (according to my Taco), so I'm curious about trying out maybe Burien. Does anyone here have any other experiences with Burien Service Dept?

 

Just purchased my 2021 BR DCLB yesterday at from Toyota Olympia. My buddy is the finance manager and got me the spec I wanted; Off Road w/ premium package, long bed, led lights. Started looking on Wednesday and took delivery on Sunday. Crazy how fast it was even with the nationwide inventory problem. Other dealers were pressuring me into a different color or even a short bed but I knew that I wouldn't be happy with any other color.

 

I got the best price out of Michaels (dealt with a guy named Lucas Lin). The tip above about emailing all their internet sales departments and playing them against each other is the right approach. A couple other tips:

1. set up a Google Voice number and give everyone that instead of your actual phone. They WILL call you, a lot, and text relentlessly, and most of the forms on their websites require a phone number, so you don't want that blowing up your phone.
2. only deal through text or email to keep a record of the offers
3. let them "stew" a bit once you have some good offers. Time is the best weapon you have when buying a car, if you get to the place where you have a couple good offers, and then kinda ghost them for a week or so, someone will invariably come back with a better offer.

 

Recently there has been some discussion in another thread regarding how bad the Bremerton Dealer is, and so I decided to check this old thread.

It is not a coincidence that, after nearly 2500 views, there have been ZERO votes for this Toyota Dealer in Bremerton, WA - not even one !
Enough said.

 

Foothills Toyota in Burlington was good to me in 2021. Got my truck there for MSRP and no added dealer-BS/upselling.

I had some accessories I wanted to add like a bed mat, sill guards, tailgate lock, spare tire lock. They priced matched the best online price I could find for the ones they had in stock and sold them to me with the truck (for me to install).

It was an easy no hassle / no harassment experience.

I talked to 23 Washington dealers within a 3 hour drive of Seattle at the time and Foothills came out on top. 1/3 fizzled out with communication/follow-up, 1/3 imposed a dealer profit fee / market adjustment, the last 1/3 made the final round. Bonus to Foothills for having lower taxes too.

The only truly negative experience I had worth naming was with Lake City. They said they had the truck I wanted in stock for MSRP. I got there and learned they didn't actually have it in stock, just allocated, and they wanted $7k over MSRP. Tried negotiating with them. Giant waste of time. If I were more petty, I would have driven up in my new Tacoma just to show them I bought it elsewhere.

@Stephen1988

 

I bought my 98 from Michael's way back in the day. I was going to buy my '16 there, but turns out my dad is hunting buddies with a sales manager at Burien so went there and scored a good deal with no effort.

Michael's is my closest dealer that's done all my recent work. But I've noticed the level of dishonesty increasing with some wild estimates for service.

 

Burien can be shady too, I was there in person to refer my brother for a purchase (brand new rav4) and suppose to get $100 referral credit, I never did, and even followed up with a phone calls, and never got anything except “we’ll send it to you”. That was a few years ago, never got anything. It’s not about money, follow thru goes a long way.
When it was time to buy my Taco, I never considered them.