I’ve never paid a penny so far, even on a car with £2900 of extras, but I haven’t had delivery of my latest car yet (September they reckon…).
I can understand dealers not taking cash, it’s become a nightmare, you have to insure your safe for the amount you keep in it & premiums have skyrocketed recently. On top of that you need someone to count up the cash, fill in forms and deposit the money at the bank, the banks also don’t want your cash and apply fees to you to deposit it. Security then becomes a thing as does health and safety. You can’t have the accounts payable lady tootle off to the bank like we used to at the College with £95,000 in a Tesco carrier bag (day after the open weekend course sign ups, we all had to count cash all morning), now we have to pay Securicor thousands a year to collect it each week, even though in the last 20 years the average weekly cash banked has gone from around £20,000 to about £700 (mostly taken in cash from OAPS using the hair & beauty dept for a “glow up”).
In life, it's not who you know that's important, it's how your wife found out.