Well, need to go into the dealership to test drive the cars.
Recently I went through the car buying experience. Here's what have happened. I did some research online to see the models and the prices of the car. Then I started with Costco's car buying program, which referred me to a dealer. Went to the dealership to test drive, and negotiated to a price that they won't sell. I walked. Went online and emailed all the dealerships in the area for a quote on the car spec I gave. One of the dealers actually emailed back with a quote below the test-driven dealer's price. Went over to pick up the car.
Do some research, make a short list of cars that you want (and can afford), have some range of quotes from various websites (I used to check truecar and KBB, not sure if it's still a good source). Then make a few phone calls to the dealers, press for prices (with the exact base model and add-ons you need). Any dealer who doesn't want to give a quote, you can walk away, or rather, end the phone call.
A few years back, it took me half a day researching and half a day visiting two dealers to get the car I wanted, at a reasonable price: I think it was in the 90% percentile cheaper in true car's range, even though I bought my car in SF bay area, which is supposedly more expensive than the average price.
It's not hard to find auto wholesale prices online. Most dealers these days you can call up and say, "hey, I know your wholesale price on this car is $x, can you give me the car for $100 more than that?" They're pretty used to this anymore; they don't expect to make anything on "internet orders". If nothing else, it adds revenue and sales volume to their aggregate numbers.
One of the people in the car dealing industry I talked to recently told me that the business model now is not based on selling new cars, but to sell services/insurances and a bit from used cars. This makes total sense because they got the first placement for the services, and people are probably not as prepared with service/insurance quotes compared with new car price quotes :) Maybe this is also why Tesla gets a hard time with the auto dealers when they want to do after sale services too.
