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If someone says, "They are talking cars and deals", what does "deals" mean in that sentence?
I googled and found many expressions like "steel and deals", "events and deals", "coupons and deals", "meals and deals", etc.
But I don't know what does "...and deals" mean, and whether it is an idomatical use or not.
Does that have anything to do with "business" or "contracts"?
Google says that a deal (in accordance with your sentence) is:
An agreement entered into, by two or more parties for their mutual benefit, esp. in a business or political context.
You can also find it in here that a deal means a trade, a sale (to sell), or a transaction.
By extension, talking (about) cars and deals means talking about cars as well as transactions, sales, or trades on cars.
And it is not idiomatic thing, at all. It's a business term as you supposed. The same meaning counts for "steel and deals","coupons and deals" and so forth.
P.S.: Just make sure to check out the context of the sentence to understand if that the "deals" meaning "trades" of "the previous mentioned things" actually fit the whole sentence.
In the U.S. at least, many cars are sold at dealerships, where a staff of salesmen work for the car dealer.
Buying a car from a dealership is not at all like buying a jar of spaghetti sauce at the supermarket. The spaghetti sauce has a price tag, and that's the price that everyone pays. The car may or may not have a price tag on it, and, even if it does, many walk onto the dealership lot knowing full well that the stated price is negotiable.
Customers can offer less money for the car than the quoted price. The dealership may also offer incentives (such as extended warranties, a lower interest rate on the car loan, or more money for a traded-in used car) in an effort to make the sale. In short, buying a car is a more complicated ordeal than buying that jar of tomato sauce, fraught with much less certainty and much more haggling.
Getting a good deal at the supermarket means that spaghetti sauce was on sale that day, or maybe you had a coupon for 75¢ off (or maybe even both). Getting a good deal at a car dealership is not quite so simple; however, car dealers will advertise savings events from time to time, where customers can take advantage of:
As for "They are talking cars and deals," you haven't told us where you saw or heard that sentence, so it's hard to say for sure, but I'd assume it was either a car dealership promoting a special sales event designed to bring more customers to the dealership, or else a car salesman and customer engaged in a discussion, in the process of negotiating a possible sale on the lot. The deal in this context is the final transaction that gets the customer to sign a contract that will eventually lead to the customer driving the car home off the lot.
"Cars and deals" is such an unusual formulation that I have to wonder what the context was. Deals certainly could refer back to cars, but it is not idiomatic.
If I heard "cars and deals" alone, I would suspect that they were talking about two separate topics. I would tend to think that deals as a conversational topic refers to business deals (real-estate, stock trades, bank loans, etc). If "they" were two stock brokers (for example), I would be nearly certain this referred to two separate topics of discussion.
