When I bought my Lusso Premium manual, I negotiated hard and couldn't get below MSRP. The car was in transit to the dealer when I pulled the trigger. All I got was the $500 factory rebate.
I picked up the car the day after it arrived at the dealer. I found the window sticker in the cubby between the seats, and I also found a second sticker in there, which showed a $1298 fee (!!) for Permaplate, and a $499 fee for ETCH Anti-theft. As far as I could tell, the ETCH deal included a bunch of stickers on doors, hood and trunk lid, showing an 800 number. WTF good is that?? Absolutely none. And the Permaplate? Total BS! When would they have had time to apply it? I think all that $1298 fee bought was a couple of stickers on the windshield and driver's side window.
That extra window sticker also included a $4995 "AMV" - adjusted market value. That would have brought the "total price" to over $39K!!
The dealer never mentioned those extras to me, and I obviously didn't pay for them. If they had tried to ding me for those extras, I would have walked, and they knew it.
They charged me a $275 doc fee, which I thought was a bit of a rip, but I let it go, not wanting to do any more arguing with them. I bought the car out of state, so I had to wait a few days for them to mail the MCO to my home state DMV. Imagine my surprise when the document packet included a check for the title and reg fees - $347! So they came out on the short end of that part of the transaction.
This kind of behavior is typical in the car dealer world. I heard recently that some BMW dealers are *doubling* the MSRP on the new, desirable M2. Dealers care a lot more about their margins than they do about their customers.
I peeled the Permaplate stickers off the windows...