I stopped at a different dealership and got the deal. A 2015 RAV4 XLE AWD should be $300 a month. They added the cost of the Camry, ($459 x 12), into the new lease ($159 x 36) to reach her monthly payment of $459 ($300 + $159).
They did not disclose anywhere that they were doing this, even where it asks on the new lease. They wrote in “N/A”.
Heading there now.
Assuming that your mother’s Camry has little or no damage, I’ll bet that they’re going to make a decent amount reselling it. Toyotas and Hondas suffer relatively little depreciation.
They’re still not going to eat five and half grand. They put it in the deal, the question is where? If they failed to disclose it, the contract may not be valid.
So they printed out a new lease, which DID disclose the hidden $5K, which demonstrated that the one she signed was inaccurate. The lease she signed read, “purchase price $31,000”, the new one shows “purchase price $26,000” plus the hidden 5grand to make it 31,000.
The sales manager wouldn’t budge on price, but she got the Camry back, since she was paying for it anyway, and her mileage extended to 45,000, all for the same ridiculously high price she was paying.
She’s happy, but I don’t know if even this shitty deal is “fair”.
I’m confused. If she got the Camry back, why is 5k still on the lease? It seems to me it should be one or the other. Either the dealership takes the Camry and rolls the remaining payments into the new lease OR she keeps the Camry and the Rav4 and makes lease payments on both of them, in which case the the Rav4 lease shouldn’t make any mention of the 5k.
I’m assuming the Camry was a lease, right. If that’s the case, Toyota is still going to want it back, but probably not until the lease is up in 24 months (that’s how many months she has left on it, right).
It sounds like they just turned two lease payments into one. I understand it’s not what she, or you, thought was going to happen, but it sounds like that’s how it worked out.
She had a 3 year lease for a Camry ending in July/2016. She was told she could cancel it, with no penalty, as long as she signed a new lease. So she did, turned in the Camry, and drove home with a new RAV4.
The new lease was for 3 years at $459 a month, an exorbitant amount for a $25,000 car. The new lease was clear: there was no prior balance from any previous lease. So it looked like they honored their word and let her out.
However, where it lists the price of the car, the salesman had added $5000, which was what she still owed on the old lease, so Toyota was still getting their money out of her except now she had no Camry.
Here’s where it gets really shady: because they lied about the old lease, they couldn’t very well let her have the car, because that would reveal that she had paid for it, so they kept it!
Once it became clear what had happened, today, they agreed to give her back the car. Well, of course, she was paying for it and is entitled to use it until 2016.
Now that it’s clear how fraudulent the whole thing was, we’re not dropping it. She didn’t “strike a bad deal.” She was lied to, was presented fraudulent documents to sign, and had a car stolen from her.
We’re pursuing this further.
Given these latter revelations, I think you should.
Wowsers. I don’t now what agencies you would report that to: police? Toyota corporation? local consumer affairs organizations? but definitely worth pursuing.
Here are a couple links to help calculate lease payments:
That second site offers an online tool to crunch all the numbers, but it’s not free (19.95 for lifetime access). I don’t know anything about it, having never used it.
I suspect our in-laws got a bit rooked when THEY signed a lease - though their monthly payment is “only” 209, we provided them a down payment of about 3 grand. I’ll have to ask my sister in law to see if she has access to the parents’ paperwork (their lease is up in about a year). I’m normally deeply opposed to leasing, but in their case it wasn’t a completely wacky idea, as they’re both in their late 70s and there was the real possibility of their not even needing a car by the time this lease is up.
You could report it to Toyota headquarters, but it’s an extremely common practice.
Did she receive this in the snail mail? Common deceptive sales tactic to get you into the dealership so you can see the shiny new thing.
You can’t even really sue, because in the end you suffered no financial damages (just the waste of your time).
You could go to the TV news and claim elder abuse, but that wouldn’t actually solve anything.
It’s just a shitty world. 
Be glad you got out of it quickly, instead of trapping her in that situation. I read a lot of horror stories.
She would have still been paying for a car that she didn’t even have. They could have sold her Toyota, and collected money from 2 different people for the same time period.