You can usually always find a great deal on a popular car by finding a bulk/invoice dealer in a very large city. If you're willing to drive 8 hours, there's always some massive dealership that sells at invoice or a few hundred above to move in volume. Buy it, drive it back, avoid the local 2-3K surchage they'll add in smaller cities. They'll often even ship them to you for a 1200$ delivery fee or so. Not covered though, recommend you just drive it back after a cheap flight. If your time is worth more than this, buy it locally. Negotiating lower than MSRP but higher than invoice is trivial.
Sure, you can probably go 500-1000 lower if you're willing to spend ungodly amounts of time waiting for a dealership to need that final sale to meet some incentive at the end of the month, but that's luck and not a great use of time.
There's no such thing as a "great" deal on a car. You aren't ever going to buy a new, popular car with popular options/color at a massive discount. Why would that be possible?
And finally, if going 1000$ under invoice on a new car is that important to you, are you really the sort of person that needs to be buying new? Buy used and avoid the instant massive depreciation.
Pure speculation on my part, but I think the craziest deals will be found on cars that aren't big sellers, particularly a few months from now.
For instance, the Kia Stinger is a good car, but nobody is buying it. At some point, they'll start offering bigger and bigger incentives.
I purchased a brand new car for about $18K off MSRP because it had been accumulating dust on a dealer's lot. I bought it at a rural dealership where there just wasn't a big demand for anything but SUVs and trucks. The same car was retailing for thousands of dollars more in the city where I actually lived.
