The Best Toronto Used Car Dealers List

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Complete List of Toronto Used Car Dealerships

Find a Reputable Used Car Dealer in Toronto

With so many dealerships in Toronto, choosing just one can feel overwhelming. That’s why it’s important to know what you want first. Decide what kind of car you want. What features are important? What price can you afford? How long do you need the car to last? Research until you know your parameters. Then, use the search function here on carpages.ca to find 5-10 cars that might meet your needs and mark down which dealerships have them.

Then, check each dealership to see if it matches your needs. Look for financing options—if a dealer offers generous, high-risk financing (“Bad credit? No credit? No problem!”), they have to make up their losses by either jacking prices or cutting corners. If you have a normal credit score, take those dealerships off the list.

You will end up with ah list of the most reputable dealers in Toronto that suit your needs. Next, drill down into website of each to find out if they’re also trustworthy.

How to Find a Trustworthy Toronto/Etobicoke Used Car Dealer

A trustworthy used car dealer’s website will have the following features:

• Lots of photos of the cars. The more parts of the car that show up in the photos, the harder it is for the dealership to hide problems. Look especially for photos of the interior—a good sign that the dealer won’t pull the old bait and switch.

• A shop. A shop onsite tells you two things: that the dealership is large and successful, and that the dealership does regular maintenance. Because an onsite shop is expensive, a dealership will only have one if they use it often. 

• Warranties. A warranty is a good safety net, but, even more, it’s a sign that the dealership’s staff knows their cars. If a car has a warranty, you can bet it has been thoroughly inspected.

Once you have chosen a dealership, visit it, but watch out for the following red flags:

• No market value document. Every used car dealership produces an internal document, called a market value analysis or estimate, that shows how they arrived at their price. If there’s nothing to hide, they should be willing to show it to you.

• No maintenance history. A car might have no maintenance history document because the document got lost in the shuffle or because the dealer “doesn’t like paperwork.” Of course, it might also have no maintenance history because there’s a serious transmission problem or engine block crack that the dealership doesn’t want you to know about. Never buy a car without a maintenance history document.

• Poorly-matched paint. Matching paint is not hard to do. All it takes is a little money and a good relationship with a supplier. If a used car dealership doesn’t have either of those, they’re not worth your time.

• Avoiding talking in terms of price. A classic tactic of shady used car dealers is insisting on talking in terms of payments, rather than price. This is because when they talk about payments, they make it harder for the customer to make apples-to-apples comparisons with other dealers. Always insist instead to talk price before you talk payments. If they push back or flat-out refuse to do so, head for the door.

• Any finance scheme more complicated than a set number of monthly payments. For a large number of used car dealerships, financing is where they reap their profits. In their business model, selling cars is just the first step toward what they really want to do: make loans. That isn’t, in itself, untrustworthy. Where it becomes untrustworthy is when dealerships try to juice their profits even more. Some dealers might build you a special finance agreement that just so happens to include add-ons you didn’t want, like extended warranties or rust-proofing. Others might offer variable interest rates calculated by a complicated formula that will, we assure you, cost you more. Insist on keeping financing simple and never commit to buying more as part of a financing agreement.

Things to Look for in a Toronto Used Car Dealership

Toronto is huge, and huge cities mean more competition for every business from restaurants to dealers. In the same way that there’s always a better, cheaper butter chicken, there’s always a better, cheaper dealership.

This is good news for consumers. Use it to your advantage.

You can easily find the lowest price for the car model you want, right here on carpages.ca, but that doesn’t mean you should go to the lowest-priced dealership. Instead, go to one of the reputable dealerships on your list and insist they match the lowest price in the city. That way, you get the benefits of a reputable dealer, such as transparent financing and reliable maintenance, at the price point of a disreputable dealer.

In addition, the size of Toronto means that every kind of specialty dealer imaginable can be found somewhere in the city. Want someone who only deals in classic cars? Exotic cars? Chinese- or Korean-made cars? There’s a dealer for you.

Read Reviews About Used Car Dealers Before Going

DealerRater is your best friend here. It’s a specialized website for users who know a lot about cars and car dealerships, and can give you the best, most educated opinions about the different dealers in Toronto. However, it can be a bit… inaccessible. Sometimes the reviewers forget to write for laypeople as well as auto nerds. For more general reviews, Google Maps is a great resource. It can even save you time by letting you note the locations of the dealerships as you’re researching them.

When looking at reviews, look for dealerships that have both lots of reviews and a strong average review,as this is the best sign that lots of customers have left happy. A 3.5 star average from 200 users is a much better indicator of quality than a 5 star average from a pair of users (who, let’s face it, are probably the owner and the owner’s spouse).

We know this all feels like a ton of work. It is. It’s also probably the best-paying work you’ll ever do. Finding the right car in the right dealership can easily save you $1000 in price, interest, unnecessary add-ons, and maintenance. Spend two hours to do it and, congratulations, you’ve just made $500 an hour. Happy hunting!