Foothills Toyota

We did our homework online and thought we would get a Subaru Forester, or maybe a Nissan Rogue or a Honda CR-V from one of the dealers at Karmart across the street. The Subaru guys didn't seem very eager to sell us anything; they talked a good game on the phone but in person they were uninterested in us. We even had to go inside to find a salesperson to talk to. The Jeep salespeople didn't come out to talk to us either, but they didn't seem particularly interested in us by email either. (Other dealers from those manufacturers made better impressions through email and phone, and I think we would've stuck with the Forester if we'd shopped nearer to our home, but we wanted to buy in Skagit County because of the sales taxes.) The Karmart Nissan guys tried real hard both on the phone and in person. It seems like a decent operation, aside from some lame old-fashioned sales techniques. We negotiated with them extensively and in fact they _eventually_ offered us a really good vehicle at a pretty good price. We would probably have been fine with them: we would have been buying a vehicle that had quite a few things we don't need or want at a slightly higher price than we wanted to pay, and the process was going to be a little bitter because we had wrenched a verbal deal out of the dealer and when we sat down and started to put things on paper the verbal deal wasn’t what they put in front of us. We went back and forth from the Nissan dealer to the Toyota dealer, and in the end we felt a lot more comfortable with the situation at Foothills Toyota. They actually had not made a good impression through email, and when we walked onto the lot we were initially only shopping, intending to buy a Forester, a Rogue, or a CR-V later in the day. But we wanted to stop by because the RAV4 wasn’t too far from our ideal vehicle. (The Rogue has better mileage and a touch more cargo space, and the Forester has better mileage but a little less cargo space, but it has the best safety ratings and you should be able to get it at a better price. The CR-V is fairly competitive with all this but has the best gas mileage by a hair over the Rogue or Forester.) More importantly, my sister and her husband have bought vehicles from Foothills and had them serviced there, and they referred us with enthusiasm. We also got a really good sense from the salesperson (Titus) that he wasn't ripping us off or playing games. We had done our online research thoroughly, so we were able to tell him what we wanted and he told us what it would cost (which was close to what the internet said it should be, after this and that) with no runaround or attempts to sell us a different vehicle. Everything went well through the entire process. My wife and I both feel good about the purchase. In a few months we'll be back here to review their service. Assuming nothing goes awry with the service, the first place I would go next time I need to buy a car, or the first place I would refer someone in this area to, would be Foothills Toyota.