Car Purchase - Payment Methods

[TheSaltedCaramelPath]

Has anyone any experience of buying a new car - and paying by credit card?

(Intending to use savings and then settle the balance in full when due after 30 days)
Is this routinely accepted by dealerships? (If I clear it with credit card company in advance?).

I’m older and for various reasons it will be the first time purchasing a vehicle on my own this time.

Or appreciate any experiences of how you have made payment, eg bank transfer on the day of collection and if that works smoothly?

Appreciate any input on what is the norm (not using a loan in this case).

Most dealers accept credit cards, if nothing else because they need to for service work! But because of merchant transaction fees most they will have an upper limit of how much they’ll accept by credit card, which will vary from dealer to dealer. I’d imagine anything under £5k would be fine, but you might just need to ask them the question.

I think I depends on the car value. I took out a personal loan to buy a car a couple of years ago which took longer to land in my bank than I anticipated. I asked the dealership if I could pay on my credit card and they said no because they get charged a percentage of the transaction so they had a cap on how much you can pay on credit card (they said no to £14k which was the price of the car).

Dd recently got a car through Cinch - they were willing to put it through using several credit cards.

I used my debit card to pay for my car recently. Easiest way of transferring the cash to the dealer. It was just like any other card transaction

I did this a few years ago in American and it was great. So many reward points it worked out to a free trip to Mexico! But my card there had no credit limit so it was doable.

In the UK not only did I not have a card that would have covered the full amount they wouldn’t accept it anyway and insisted on a bank transfer. Sad times.

We have bought multiple new cars & motorcycles, always cash (i.e. no finance agreements) but never have we been able to pay anything more than the initial deposit by CC, the balance has always had to be paid by debit card.

Only used bank transfer for our motorhome(s) as the value would be too much for a normal daily debit card transaction but even then we had to pre-arrange the transfer.