OK, I found a dealer that supposedly puts the invoice on all the cars and sells them for $100 over and won't budge on that. As of 10 minutes ago in zip 20716 for a Mazda 3 s Touring, with the moonroof/6CD option I’ve found invoices listed at a couple different websites:

Carsdirect.com - $18,014
Triple A's website - $17,814
Edmunds.com - $17,814

The invoice listed at the dealer is about what Carsdirect.com lists. Does anyone have any advice on where to find the real invoice? Is there a good reason why different websites say different things? Reading other posts, it seems everyone is pretty sure paying over invoice is a major mistake even though the 3’s are pretty popular. Of course, I may just be dumb, but any help would be great.

 

I wouldn't pay $0.01 over invoice for a car. I've got dealers here offering $750 UNDER invoice on brand new Mazdaspeed6's.

You'd just need to check each website against the other to see how they come up with their numbers.

Invoice is fair price anything more is gouging (IMO)

 

Hey, great advice, in a nutshell if anyone cares, this is what I found -

Carsdirect adds estimated local and regional fees from the manufacturer to the dealer (things like advertising fees) which makes their estimated invoice higher.

AAA had nothing and was worthless.

Edmunds stated it does not add the estimated local fees but explained further that these fees may be real or written in by the dealer to jack up the price further AND to consider other things like "dealer holdback" and "manufacturer-to-dealer cash" (you all can look these up for yourself) that make the dealer's actual cost lower.

And I thought I was a smart car shopper. Thanks for the advise.