quote:

posted by jljones:
Which would be cool.

If that’s what they actually did.

We have two Durango’s with cam shaft failures that are under warranty. The dealership estimates that we should get them back….around Christmas. ...

FCA, Stellantis or whatever they call themselves this week are an example of how not to do it, all right. But that doesn't change my point.



What doesn't get a mention is where all the worn-off metal went. There's no guarantee the shavings sifted down into the oil pan - which can be removed and cleaned out or more likely replaced - or got caught by the oil filter. Maybe a piece is caught in an oil passage. Comforting, isn't it?

I waited almost six months for a black headrest for a 2024 4Runner that had a manufacturers defect.

About a year ago, the local Toyota dealer was running a special on coolant flush/replacement. It seemed almost too good to be true. So I took the mailer in with the ad circled in black marker. When I came in to pick it up, the bill was 4 times the deal. When I looked at the bill, it was for transmission fluid and filter change and not coolant. When I told them they did the wrong thing, they insisted that they didn’t. I got all the way to the service manager who told me I could have my vehicle back when I paid the bill. And if I continued to argue he’d call the police.

Yeah we need factory service.

Yes dealerships are needed. The problem is that most of the sales people don't know anything about cars in general nor about their models specifically. I can learn more from their crappy websites than from asking salesmen.

I need to test drive different models, drivetrains, and trims to see what I like. About half the time I find the color and trim level I want on the dealer's lot or they can truck it in from a nearby dealer.

The last 3 new vehicle purchases were fairly pleasant experiences as far as the buying process. The usual push to upsell various nonsense like glass etched codes and wheel insurance. But otherwise they made it easy and reasonably quick.

While I need the dealer for maintenance, I hate their business model more than their sales business model. I always feel cheated by the service department.

When I bought my last car they had plenty of cars on the lot. This was 2 years ago.

I had a low key salesman who I liked.

When I got to the finance guy it was a different story. This guy was pushy and high pressure. I didn’t enjoy that part of the game at all.

I left top reviews for the salesman and blasted the finance guy on the survey they always send you.

quote:

Originally posted by jljones:

... if I continued to argue he’d call the police.

I thought that you are "the police."

My younger kid (kid? He'll be sixty next year. Time flies when you're having fun). Anyway, he had a sort of similar situation. He handed his business card to the service manager. He was a prosecutor in the District Attorney's Office. The situation was resolved very quickly.

jljones, the car market is at an inflection point right now. Inventories are building up across all manufactures because no one has any money to buy vehicles at the inflated prices. Even Toyota inventories are starting to build back up again.

As Orguss, we are seeing the start of car brokers like Cartelligent and caredge.com come onto the scene. Services like these actually locate and do the deal for your. These are different from the affinity marketing programs from places like Costco and USAA. These brokers locate the vehicle for you and negotiate a final out the door price.

I had thought about doing a Cartelligent type business over 15 years ago. Routinely, I’ve been able to buy vehicles at invoice or lower (sometimes thousands under invoice) through my adult life. 2017 I bought a new performance vehicle that people were paying $10k over MSRP to get, and I bought it for $500 under invoice. The forum for that vehicle immediately accused me of being a liar right until I posted the sales sheet. I blacked out my information but left the dealer/salesman info as well as the VIN. Then in 2019, I bought a truck, and it took me 3 months of saying no to the sales manager before he gave in. I wasn’t used to having to take 3 months to get what I want. I paid straight invoice, and didn’t budge a red cent on what I wanted for the MY2017 vehicle above for trade in as it started having multiple little problems under warranty so it scared me off it post warranty.

Then 2020 hit. At first in the pandemic, you could steal deals on vehicles, big time. Stealerships were bending over backwards. Most of us that are sane, didn’t want to make any big purchases at this time because we didn’t know which hurdle Covid was going to throw at us next. At work we had people moving, without HR approval, out of state. Even my boss who is a Senior Director said move to your rural land, just do it. Nope. I’m too conservative to take that chance.

At any rate, the sales model has been on this Covid bullshit for 5 years straight now. And that has been a total sellers market. Vehicle MSRP’s have skyrocketed, 33% on average. Those increased costs to consumer + greedy stealers everywhere, every Manu, every city/suburb/town, has the vehicle market on the fringe of imploding. Interest rates are still high(er), and even now the got damn stealers are so stubborn on pricing. They make more money when they move a lot of units for less profit on each, versus selling fewer and gouging. I want to replace my daily driver, and know what I want. But I’m not doing it until the Fed gets reasonable with the Fed rate and I’m crossing fingers this will correspond with these stealers having to deal. Sellers market vs. buyers market ebbs and flows and we are long overdue for a buyers market. Inflation is killing this country, financially, at least for consumers.

I got a survey in my email today for my recent buying experience of our new Pathfinder . No complaints to speak of . Nobody tried to pressure me into anything , The finance guy wanted to sell me all sorts of add on policies but I told him no thanks and he moved on . Way too much competition in this area for dealers to be jerking people around .

quote:

Originally posted by selogic:
I got a survey in my email today for my recent buying experience of our new Pathfinder . No complaints to speak of . Nobody tried to pressure me into anything , The finance guy wanted to sell me all sorts of add on policies but I told him no thanks and he moved on . Way too much competition in this area for dealers to be jerking people around .

Could not agree more!
Even though many sales people try to make it sound like the generic Chevy or a ford you want is a very special and highly limited item..BS!

The thing that needs to be understood to get an idea of where we are at right now is that you and I aren’t the manufacturer’s customers - the dealers are. The dealers were making money hand over fist during COVID and the manufacturers wanted more of a taste of that as well. They didn’t think about the long term, they wanted more money - NOW! So the manufacturers jacked up prices far in excess of actual inflationary pressures warranted so they could cash in. At first it didn’t matter because there was so much free money from the COVID printing press sugar high. Then when the inflationary hangover kicked in the manufacturers didn’t want to report lower earnings to the shareholders and hurt their quarterly bonuses so they continued to only make the most expensive vehicles and trim levels. Their customers (the dealers) had to take most of the vehicles because of contractual franchise obligations. At the same time the manufacturers had gotten used to not offering incentives to sell vehicles and they literally bankrupted a bunch of dealerships that now had vehicles that they couldn’t move.

The dealerships turned to ever shadier practices in their parts departments, service departments, finance, etc. to try to stay afloat. They saw it as survival but it turned a LOT of previously loyal customers off and in some cases made things even worse. In many cases mom and pop dealerships sold out to large corporations that owned hundreds if not thousands of dealerships like Autonation and the like. This squeezed consumers even more because they were now forced to buy from corporations that had enough Capital to try to hold out for the profits that they really wanted. They doubled down on the screwing of consumers in order to keep margin and the Autonations of the world can afford to spend a lot on lobbyists too, further squeezing consumers.

The only light at the end of the tunnel for consumers has been the fact that even the mega dealer conglomerates have started to turn down allocations from the manufacturers, basically just buying the minimum required by their franchise contracts and now the manufacturers are starting to notice. The end of the EV subsidies has had a big impact too. Manufacturers can’t just get the government to pay for them to figure out how to make electric cars that nobody really wants. The roll back of much of the EPA forced electricification means that the manufacturers are going to have to make cars that people want to buy, not just what the government will make them buy. The manufacturers are having to pay attention further down the stream to the ultimate buyers of vehicles and not just their direct customers. I don’t see things getting much better though until interest rates come down a bit. Even though interest rates aren’t terrible given historic norms they’re still very high for the last 25-30 years and the up and coming consumers are far more sensitive to interest rates and it will take much longer for them to get used to higher interest rates.

quote:

The thing that needs to be understood to get an idea of where we are at right now is that you and I aren’t the manufacturer’s customers - the dealers are.

Who else can force their customer to take the product in whatever amounts they want to say the customer must take?

Yes, the dealers were making money hand over fist during COVID but now they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

I have made it clear here that I LOATHE new car dealerships..."stealerships" as I call them.

The retail pricing model (ie: you see a price tag on a car and you pay it or you go somewhere else, like a toaster or a loaf of bread) of the CarMax style places is becoming more and more popular and I think eventually these new car dealerships with all their tricks and games will go the way of the dodo bird. GOOD

We bought a 3 year old Honda Odyssey from a local Honda dealership only because that was where we found what we needed and those fuckers tried to sell the van out from under us AFTER we put down a deposit and signed paperwork on it, back in 2020. Then on the day you go to finalize the sale this wonderful vehicle is "suddenly" a total POS if you don't buy this extended warranty RIGHT NOW. I felt like I needed to take a shower after coming home and dealing with these oily sales people.