I've always had a very easy time buying cars, new cars are surprisingly easy to get them to move around on. If one guy doesn't play ball just stand up and walk to the nearest other salesman you see and say "hey so he doesn't want a commission but I'm sure you do"

I used that tactic for my 2017 truck

 

I never had a hard time buying cars sometimes because I have my friend who is in the business make a few calls for me and other times forums point me to a dealer that is buyer friendly. My BMW isn’t in a great neighborhood but very honorable and has the best prices. Like others I get my lease terms (money factor, residual, rebates) from edmunds forum and plug in the numbers knowing what I want to pay for the car and I calculate my payment using a spreadsheet I have. I negotiate the selling price and then when I get to the dealer their calculation is within a couple dollars and I’m good.

My business partner just leased a Q7 and I ran the numbers and compared to what they were offering to see if they were screwing around and I was shocked I calculated it within a couple bucks so I didn’t need to go down there with him. Saved me a trip.

 

They didn't start high as the moon and have to be talked down?

Numbers looked good first time?

This is making me think maybe some dealers are more hungry for a sale than others.

Just a guess tho...

 

No they gave a fair deal on the car and a fair deal on the equity on the MDX they traded. It was a dealer that owns an Acura and Audi dealer literally next to each other. Not the best deal in the world but below MSRP and also has a small rebate. Since it’s for our business it’s a write off anyway so I wasn’t going to nickel and dime them. Compare that to all of the Toyota dealers around the area (and there are a bunch) when he was looking for a 4Runner and all had markups on them which he smartly said thanks but no thanks and walked. Some were up front and others didn’t mention it until he got to the dealer.

 

Allrighty, I will regail you with the tale.

So, like I posted this morning early, I have done plenty of research now and I know the MF, Rebates, residuals etc for the car. I Have had two price quotes from dealers, and they were both terrible. The lease does have a very poor MF, .00428, which translates to 10.2%, which is awful. Residual though isn't bad at 48%, and with the heavy rebates and the $7,500 tax credit which I wouldn't qualify for on a purchase but that I could get on a lease, if I can get a deal without being hosed the lease would still be the best thing since we're not going to keep this more than 3 years.

So, I reached out to a dealer through TrueCar.com. which is a service I have used before with decent luck. Salesman got back to me this morning and gave me what was actually a very good price quote. Told him I want to lease and just to cut out the back and forth I just gave him the bottom line over text because it was a fair deal:

$3k off MSRP
$12,250 in rebates (including the $7,500 tax credit)
$31,000 for my trade (which gave me $4,500 in positive equity, putting that down)
48% residual
.00428 MF
Taxes rolled in
First month drive off
Payment ~ $720.

Told him if he can do that, I will do the deal today.

He replied back "sounds reasonable". Well, thats pretty abiguous, I relied back "I want to make sure the numbers I presented are accurate and you can do that deal" He replies "the numbers are accurate, we can do that deal", great, set an appointment for 5:30. I was a little concerned when he didn't know that on a lease the tax credit comes as a rebate...but it is what it is. Its an 1:15 drive to this dealer.

We get there, and he's with customers doing a delivery (we had an appointment, but whatever). So, he pulls the van into this pretty cool indoor area for us to play around with it, thats where I took this shot:



He'll be no more than 10-15 minutes. We sat in it and synced our phones and all, and play around, 45 minutes later he comes in, and goes "lets take it for a drive". Well, we really didnt need to do that...but he insisted so we played along. I suggested he take our Pacifica and have them look it over while we are gone "no need". We literally drove it one block and back to the dealer "looks great".

So we sit down, he gets all the disclosures for the payoff etc signed, and goes and takes pictures of our Pacifica and goes over to the manager, and 25 more minutes go by. He comes back, $28,000 for the Pacifica...deal was $31,000 and I had that in writing from one other dealer and CarMax. "Thats not what we discussed" he goes: "I know, and I told my manager that but I'm just the messenger". So my next question is "how does that factor into the payment? I'm not doing this deal if its not $720 a month for 36 months with $720 out of pocket" He goes "it will work out, sign here" so, I go "I'm not signing anything until I see the payment". So he writes on the bottom of the page "I agree to buy the car if the payment is $720 a month or less" to which I add "36 months, 10k per year with $720 out of pocket" and I signed. He goes off to “talk to his manager” again

We sit there another 25 minutes, and another guy comes over...its the finance guy to take us back. We have no deal...how can we go back to finance? Salesman walks up and introduces us to the finance guy so I reply "So we have a deal at $720?" "yes we do!" Great, back we go.

He spends time typing all the numbers in he has been given, and he goes "Just so you know we're going to be around $840 in payment". No. I told him thats not the agreement we had with the sales department, and he goes okay, I will put it all in and just have them sign off on it. After taking the app and all and SSN and income info hes typing and all and he says "I'm not sure how they want this to work, the numbers they gave me don't give us a $720 payment, they give us a $840 payment". I again said no, thats not what we discussed...at this point we have been there 2.5 hours and we drove over an hour to get there. I said to the guy "If this doesn't work out as I had been told, you have have COLOSSALLY wasted our time", he goes out to talk to the salesman and sales manager. 20 more minutes go by, he comes in and sits down, salesman comes in too and stands next to him "We're at an $840 payment, we need to look at a Limited to get to the payment you want" . "No, you and I had a deal, and I drove over an hour to get here and I repeatedly told you that was the deal on this car, and you have repeatedly told me we have a deal for me to then find out there is no deal and nobody knows what you've been talking about. This whole thing has been a complete and total f'ing waste of our time". He didn't like the F bomb, and starts to do the whole "hey now, none of that blah blah" victim BS, so I told him "I'm done with you get out and send your manager in here"

So, manager comes in. I lay it all out for him, the agreement, showed him the texts...I believe he legitimately did not know anything about this deal. I'm not sure what the salesman thought he was going to accomplish, that eventually I would just cave and accept the higher payment. All the time "talking to the manager" he clearly wasn't. The guy legitimately did not know what I was talking about. So I got out my lease calculator and I said "look, if you give me the rebates stated, and $3k off the car, and give me $31k for my trade, then you can give me the deal I was promised. We drove over an hour to be here, we've been here for 3 hours, had this joker just told me at 10:30 this morning he couldn't do this none of us would have wasted all this time. You guys want to go home and so do we, and if we aren't selling and buying a car tonight I think we all would rather just not be here. So he sat down at the computer and changed the numbers and said "721.99, does that work?" Yes. And we signed the deal, another hour later we left and drove the hour long way home.

In all of my many years of buying cars, I have never been run around that bad. Where the guy just repeatedly tried to lie to me and bait and switch me. I do not at all feel like the finance guy or the manager were in on it, in fact the finance guy didn't try and sell us anything...and both of them apologized profusely and thanked us for being patient and for our business. I said to my wife on the way home "well...you learned a lot about buying cars tonight" lol

I cannot wait for the survey.

 

Does this dealership have a website and/or a facebook page, etc., that you can post your experience on? Something like this needs to be shared with other possible customers.

 

I actually don’t think that is out of the ordinary. I wonder if the sales guy understands leases and just never learned and just hopes it all works out when it gets to finance. I have dealt with sales people where they don’t understand leases so I just tell them this is what I need for the trade and this is what I’m paying for the car and I have to work with finance to make the numbers and sometimes that is where the shenanigans start and I have to tell them where to adjust the numbers.

 

Oh it will be!

That was really out of the ordinary. Mainstream salespeople often don’t understand leases (luxury ones do), but the managers do, and what was out of the ordinary here was the guy made commitments that clearly his management had not agreed to. I have NEVER walked into a finance office and been confronted by a payment that is different than what I had agreed to with the sales manager through the salesman, and the fact that the finance guy and the manager seemed as out of the loop as I was was also a total first for me.

The incompetence isn’t what surprised me, the continued lying that we had a deal from the salesperson is what surprised me

 

Wow. That's really frustrating. But....congrats on the van! Out of curiosity, is it your business that allows you to leverage the $7,500 credit when doing a lease? Or is that fine for personal as well? I know you have the income issue with getting the credit as a purchase, just curious why it works on a lease?

 

Thanks! When you lease the leasing company gets the credit and they usually pass it along to the consumer as a rebate. So leasing let me get that credit when I make too much money to have qualified for it on a purchase, no requirements for the rebate.

The credit basically paid for all the finance charges of the lease. So essentially it’s interest free, otherwise I wouldn’t ever accept a rate like that.

 

I do agree that is out of the ordinary. Was it some new young kid that just couldn’t help himself with just making stuff up? So weird that management didn’t know what was going on. It’s like this guy was just going rogue about everything.

 

He didn’t seem like an inexperienced kid…

 

Now that you have time to think about it do you have a theory of what really happened?

There is some red flags.

The incompetence is too smooth and organic looking between all 3 players, the salesman, sales manager, and finance guy.

1: the salesman does not have authority to spend one penny of the companies money or make any promises that come out of the company profit, this gets you fired, as we all know

2: the twenty minutes in between each consultation between the salesman and sales manager is a tactical game, it takes 30 seconds. The sales manager is watching every deal going and doing numbers in real time.

3: the finance manager didn't seem to be alarmed at all about incorrect numbers, that's a big one.

Just trying to analyze patterns from limited info which is somewhat impossible, so just ideas.

Subtle and soft, the inconsistencies point toward a hustle, imo. Hate to say that but the red flags are there. Imo

Ps- your testimony how the sales manager came in and fixed the numbers lickity split, yeah I think you were spot on about the bait and switch. And to make it more complicated, there could be a hidden 4th person in the equation who never showed their face adding to the anomoly and confusion.

 

Its certainly possible, but I am a pretty good judge of people and the finance manager and the sales manager seemed legitimately confused. The finance manager made no effort to try and convince me I should pay that payment, neither did the sales manager. It was purely that the numbers they gave to the finance manager just did not result in the payment that the salesman had committed to. I really think he had gotten numbers approved that were what he wanted and then he figured either I would cave, or the finance guy would just "make it work" but we were basically $5,000 apart, can't "make that work" without an agreement to put more money into the deal from the dealership.

When I met with the manager and showed him the texts and the calculator he was looking at that and the numbers and hes like "he just hasn't used those numbers at all." and ultimately he just matched the numbers I was promised. I truly think the salesman never took the deal he committed to to me to the manager. In the dozens and dozens of cars I have negotiated I have never had anything like that happen before. Everything is always totally agreed to before I get into the finance office...

 

A friend asked me to tag along to MB when he was picking up his car. I helped him review the paper before going in. The finance guy gave him numbers that didn't match. We went over and found out that the finance guy "conveniently" reduced trade in value a few thousands. And he blamed it to the SA. Maybe it was a mistake, may be not. These people are there to make extra money if they can IMO.