Car manufacturers offer special sales incentives every month on particular vehicle makes, models, and styles. Incentives vary from month to month.

Incentives come in the form of direct-to-customer rebates, special lease deals, and low-interest loans, including 0% APR loan deals. See Best Car Deals for current new-car incentives, including 0% loans.

Zero percent financing, when offered, means that the customer pays no interest or finance charges on his car loan. This saves money. Monthly payments are smaller and total costs are reduced.

Calculating payments for a zero percent loan is easy. Simply divide the cost of the car by the number of months in the loan. Non-zero-percent loans are much more difficult to calculate and require a car loan calculator.

Are 0% loans good deals?

Maybe.

As this is being written, this year, 2011, has become the best time to buy a new car in years. And 2012 looks to be even better.

In normal years, we would tell you that the best time to buy a car is when sales are slow at the end of the month, end or the year, or during vacation season. We would tell you that you might still have to negotiate your prices because dealers aren’t just going to give you a good deal because they like you.

BUT……..things are much different now. Sales have been slow for over a year and are still slow right now. As a result, we are now seeing some of the biggest and best car incentives on new cars that we’ve seen in years. Nearly every car manufacturer is now offering a combination of large factory-to-customer rebates, low-interest loan deals, 0% APR loans (even on long 72 month loans), special lease deals, free maintenance, and “secret” factory-to-dealer rebates that dealers usually give to customers.

Why has 2011 become such a good time to buy a car?