cool idea but feel bad for salesperson to deal with this douch....

 

I think shmuck is a rather generous description.

 

Yah, me too.

 

Totally. I feel bad for the salesperson having to deal with someone like that.

 

dont feel bad for car salesmen or GM for that matter. They are all out to screw you. The only difference is to what degree.

 

[rant]Sure. Not like they're trying to make a living or support their families or anything like that...they get joy from screwing people over so they'll never buy from the dealership again...

FWIW, I would buy (again) from Elise Fong at Longo Lexus in a heartbeat. She totally rocked my IS350 purchase. I'd've bought my IS-F from her if I were still in California.[/rant]

now back to your regularly scheduled dealership bashing...

 

Unfortunately the so-called profession of car salesperson is heavily populated by less than stellar characters. There are good exceptions of course.

 

Companies are not required to refund sales tax money, because they don't profit from it.........that money goes to state or local governments. Some companies and managers, though, do refund it on a case-by case basis, if they want to maintain customer satisfaction.

 

The buisness practices of selling new cars has improved considerably in the last 20 years or so...........mostly because of the pricing/customer-service innovations pioneered in the 1990's by Saturn, Lexus, and Infiniti. And the practice of selling used cars, of course (once lower than street gutters), was vastly improved by the Certified Pre-Owned-car programs the manufacturers adopted....though (trust me) not all CPO's are as pristine-like as the ads would suggest.

Some vultures, unfortunately, as you note, still remain in the car-sales buisness, but, by and large, they don't get away with quite the same stuff they once did (the 1980's, for example, was an especially corrupt period, especially for those who sold Japanese nameplates during the limited-import period). Truth-in-Lending Laws, laws requiring leasing details, and, of course, state lemon laws have also worked a lot to help clean up the buisness. Many salespeople today are eager to make new friends out of customers and retain them..........that helps get repeat buisness in the future.

 

GM global VP to personally call buyers who returned a vehicle
By MARK PHELAN
FREE PRESS AUTO CRITIC

General Motors Co.’s vice president for global engineering will spend the next few evenings calling customers who bought a GM vehicle and returned it during the company’s “May the best car win” promotion.


GM chairman Ed Whitacre suggested engineering vice president Mark Reuss and his team make the follow-up calls to figure out what went wrong and improve the products.



Less than 0.1%, or 200 of the 220,000 people who qualified for the exchange offer, used it, and only about 20 buyers won’t move into some other GM vehicle. But Reuss jumped at the idea.



“This is about as direct and unfiltered feedback as we’ve ever done,” the 26-year GM veteran said. “It feels pretty good.”



Reuss planned to call a buyer tonight who returned a Chevrolet Silverado pickup because of dissatisfaction with its interior room, paint and the quality of its finish. “I want to know exactly why they weren’t satisfied,” he said.



Reuss is troubled by GM’s disappointing performance in Consumer Reports magazine’s recent survey of new vehicles.



“Reliability has been the Achilles’ heel of GM for my entire career,” he said, promising he would focus the company’s engineers around the world on fixing the problem. “It gets down to an individual engineer’s ability to find a problem and leadership’s ability to fix it,” he said, adding that too many GM engineers have been reluctant to point out problems because they were afraid they’d get the blame rather than praise for catching the mistake before customers suffered.



“We have to reinvigorate ourselves around what makes vehicles reliable and valuable to customers,” he said.

http://www.freep.com/article/2009111...rned-a-vehicle

 

+1, Only the big three American manufacturers would have a gimmick program like this. If they gave me the car for 90 days I wouldn't do it. No UAW built car is allowed on my property. Hope Obama Motor goes broke doing this shell game.

 

Ok,maybe a Ford product,maybe.

 

Yep

 

Gimmick is exactly what it is. Because GM knows the odds of somebody returning the car is very low. And the crap/hard-sell interaction/wasted hours with horrible salespeople and management (plural) before a return transaction could actually be completed would wear down even the most determined customer. It's not a situation that any astute and educated car buyer wants to put himself or herself in, that's why the $500 opt-out exists.

 

Yes, that's certainly a lot of stuff about the good old days, but the overall state of cars salesmanship as a profession is still quite poor as viewed by the general public.

Of course most of us experienced buyers enter via the side door by appointment dealing only with the best salespeople and dealing mainly on price often in advance over the phone and email. For example my Lexus internet sales manager that I deal with has earned my respect and future business, the making of friends is secondary to pricing and professional performance.