How much deposit did you pay ?

[DuncanM]

Before placing my order for an SEL with 11 options that I probably wont see till March I'm not happy about having to place a large deposit. What sort of amount were you all asked to put down ?

[Dan34]

£500

[DuncanM]

Out of the three car wow dealers I'm looking at one wants £1000 and sods law that is the cheapest deal. Its just a lot can happen in 8 months.

[SRGTD]

Have you tried your local VW dealer to see if they’ll match or get close to the Carwow dealer price? Your local dealer may be prepared to accept less than £1,000 deposit.

[joshwills]

I paid for all of my options as a deposit so around £3k

[monkeyhanger]

£500. I have just under £1300 options.

[Pololass]

My local dealer matched carwow. I had £1005 extras - reef blue metallic paint, different alloys (to keep hubby quiet because he wanted energetic orange!) and parking sensors. Paid £1000 deposit

[TElwoody]

£2000 deposit with 2600 worth of options on an SE trim. Carwow discount included I actually only paid a few hundred for those options.

[david.stark]

I paid £100 by debit card in the showroom but my car was in stock. Followed up with the remaining £500 of my deposit yesterday.

Word of advice, unless they’ll throw it in for free or really cheap, avoid GAP and diamondbrite treatment.

I used ALA via money saving expert and got 25% discount which made my GAP cover £126 vs the dealers £400.

The dealer also wanted £400 for diamondbrite but a valeter I’ve used before had a special offer of just £100.

The only thing I paid for was the service plan.

[SRGTD]

I paid £100 by debit card in the showroom but my car was in stock. Followed up with the remaining £500 of my deposit yesterday.

Word of advice, unless they’ll throw it in for free or really cheap, avoid GAP and diamondbrite treatment.

I used ALA via money saving expert and got 25% discount which made my GAP cover £126 vs the dealers £400.

The dealer also wanted £400 for diamondbrite but a valeter I’ve used before had a special offer of just £100.

The only thing I paid for was the service plan.

Good advice.

The VW GAP product is very poor value as they apply a large commission/profit mark up on top of their GAP insurance supplier’s cost, making the cost to the customer very expensive. There are plenty of cheaper GAP insurance providers out there. ALA get good feedback on a number of forums, and there are usually discount codes available if you do an internet search.

I’d never let the dealer apply paint protection to my car, even if they offered to do it for free. The key to an effective paint protection treatment is the preparation stage and a professional detailer would probably spend the best part of a day and a half applying paint protection, much of which will be spent on the preparation stages (decontamination, machine polishing). A VW dealer is likely to allocate no more than a couple of hours to applying paint protection and skimp on the preparation stages. I know who I’d rather pay to apply a paint protection treatment to my car, and it wouldn’t be the VW dealer.

These add-on products (GAP, paint protection, alloy wheel and scratch / ding insurance) are a big money maker for the dealer if they can persuade customers to buy them, that’s why they nearly always go for the big sell.

[RUM4MO]

It is really quite a big lump of money that they are asking for, for what is essentially a ticket to stay in a queue, it should not be this way, some car manufacturers have messed up and so car buyers are having to wait far too long, with flexible mass production, these "every day" cars should have a maximum customer wait for a factory order of 8 > 12 weeks.(8 weeks wait for a European built car, 12 weeks to cover ROW built car)

This is starting to resemble importing a car and so making very big savings, so the long wait and heavy (25%) deposit does not phase you, though here, I'd imagine, you are guaranteed your money back if you back out of that queue, something that you could not do if importing a car from Europe.

So, if your circumstances change, I'd think that your deposit will get returned?

Salesmen need their holiday money, and not many units passing out through their doors right now - give generously?