This reminds me of the last car I leased. I went back and forth with a car dealer via email. We hashed out a deal, all online and I came in with the emails. $385. That included them taking my car with one payment left. I went in, test drove the car, liked it, started signing some stuff and the sales manager came over and asked how I was going to take care of the $680 due right now.
The what now?
He looked at me like I was an asshole for assuming that there wouldn’t be a some magical $680 due right now.
I said “That’s another $20 a month which puts this over $400 and for that I’m going to go look at Audis* so you better figure out how to get rid of that since that was never, not once brought up in the emails that we’ve been exchanging for the last few days”. He said it wasn’t negotiable, and I got up and walked out.
I gave him a day or two to call me back, I was even willing to meet him in the middle somewhere. Half the payment or maybe let me make the last payment on my current lease, something…never, not once heard back**
Then, I went to the other Honda dealership in town, grabbed the first salesperson that looked at me, plopped all the emails on his desk and said “I’m looking for a Honda Accord, 4 door EX-L, $361/month+Tax, 3 years, 15K/year. I don’t need to test drive it. You need to take my current car with one payment off my hands. I had the deal worked out with [other dealership] but it went South when they surprised me with $700 due at signing so I walked out. If you can make this happen, I’ll be out of here as fast as you can push the paperwork through.”
Within 15 minutes he had cleared it with his boss and I was doing paperwork. I was driving away about an hour and a half later.
*I have no idea how much an Audi is FTR
**I take that back, I did get a call a few months later, so I must have still been an ‘open lead’.
I don’t know of any service departments that report to CarFax. There may be some/lots but I don’t know of any.
As far as the roll back warnings, this is also an issue with factory warranty payments. Car goes to another dealer at 838 miles, service adviser fumble fingers the mileage as 8,338. That claim gets paid but a few months later comes into my dealer with 4,500 miles and my claim gets bounced and we have to do the paper chase to get it straightened out.
Yes that is a true example.
Riggggggght, but at what point is rolling back only 10 or 20k going to switch a car from a “sale” to a “no sale” for enough people that it’s worth the trouble and risk? I guess I could maybe see rollling it back either across the 100k or 200k mark making a bit of a difference, but even then not much.
The mileage had been rolled back to almost exactly 30,000 miles (~29,900) which was featured prominently in the ad description of the vehicle. The car was 3 years old. It was being pitched as a lightly-driven, like new condition. The vehicle had been bought from a wholesaler about a year before at ~36,000 and driven by yet another owner for a year before they bought it. So I estimate that the interim owner probably added 10-20k or so to the actual mileage. Could have been way more, of course.
Anyway, SOMETHING fishy happened there. Whether it was a clerical error that just made them BELIEVE they were in possession of a tampered-with car or they actually did it themselves, they practically gave it away when presented with evidence.
Ah, I see, that does make a bit more sense for a fairly new vehicle. I still don’t see them really bothering to go only roll back 10k miles, but possibly 20k or so might make enough of a difference to make it worth their while. And it’s not like you can plausibly roll it back much further!
And, yeah, it could be that learning there was that discrepancy made them more eager to sell. These days, a car with a problem on the CarFax report can be damn near unsalable even if the problem is clearly a mistake. I wasn’t buying cars that were nice enough to care about little things like odometer rollbacks back then, so I don’t know to what extent that was true 15 years ago though.
Huh? I’m not sure what you mean. If for whatever whimsical reason someone were going around rolling odometers forwards, no, there’d be no way to detect that with CarFax because it would just look like they’d racked up however many miles since the last report. If you mean why doesn’t anyone accidentally over-report mileage, they do but it doesn’t really matter whether the mistake is over or under-reporting. A car gets flagged as a potential odometer rollback when mileage gets reported that’s lower than the mileage of a previous report. If you accidentally report too many miles, the car will get flagged the next time someone reports the correct mileage.
So, to borrow Sarabellum1976’s example, it could be that whoever reported the wholesale transaction accidentally typed 36,000 instead of 26,000. Unless you’ve got at least two reports on both sides of the discrepancy, you really can’t say much definitive.
Continues the CarFax highjack. I was talking to a friend who works for a very large, country wide dealership. He’s in the body repair side and he says that they never report accidents to CarFax. Reporting that the car had had a perfectly repaired accident would lower the resale value.
He called this “diminished value” and said that the car owner could then rightfully go after the insurance companies for more money. Seeing as how the insurance companies are their biggest customers, they don’t want to upset them. Besides, they do good work.
The insurance companies don’t report to CarFax for the same reason.
On the service side, they always use CarFax when a vehicle has come in for routine maintenance. They will report to CarFax when the vehicle has come in for a recall and has been repaired. They “forget” to report to CarFax is an axel just happens to fall out or something.
[QUOTE=picunurse]
Yes, that too. My husband finally said to him, "She did the research and she IQ is way higher than mine{snip}.
[/quote]
Stop that! Do you want people to know she’s Jane…? Just how many people do you think are going to trust a nurse in cardiac surgury singing “You’ll Be In My Heart…Always!”?
I’ve had good luck with car salesmen. We buy new,* so there’s no issue with the car’s history.
The last salesmen – for Hyundai – did not push in the slightest and was very laid back. I was looking at a car and he suggested a test drive. He put the plates on it and said, “Drive it around. I’ll be in the office when you get back.” Didn’t even ask for my license. After I gave it a test, he suggested I drive it home overnight. That was great, since my wife and I could look it over in a comfortable environment with no salesman.** When the time came to negotiate, it was simple and straightforward: they ordered all their cars with a standard set of features. In addition, since the car was selling very well at the time, they didn’t pressure: someone would be along in a day or two to buy it if I balked.
*It makes far more financial sense for us, since we keep cars 15 years or more. We also like to pay cash; last time, though, I put it all on my credit card, then paid it off the next month. Got a ton of points and a free hotel stay out of it!
**I realize it’s good for the dealership psychologically, because you start to think of it as your car.
