My boss asked me to help him pass the drug test by loaning him some urine (I declined).

One time after closing the sale of a car, the shop swapped out some damaged parts and claimed the new owner was responsible. It was at night so he hadn't noticed the damage before driving off the lot.

There was also a nonstop flood of white-lies to try and build rapport with customers. Every salesman had a kid the same age as the customers or a cousin who worked at the same company.

I was relieved to get out of there & started working at a software company instead. Despite how much I hated the job, the sales skills I learned there have served me well.

I had a sales manager at a used car dealership tell me he went to the Air Force Academy (my alma mater) after he asked about my college. Little did he know we have a "secret handshake" of sorts, which he was completely clueless about. Ended up calling him on it and he backed off of his high pressure sales bullshit.

https://www.bmwusa.com/byo.html#!/model-variant-selector/3-s...

One family member bought a Mazda, and then two months later it was stolen from their home, stripped for parts and burned.

Insurance would only pay out in the form of a cheque to a dealer, and the dealer would only deal in-person, even when told they just wanted an exact replacement for the previous car. The sales guy wanted the opportunity to upsell on some other feature, rather than take the guaranteed sale.

Even now, with the advent of the internet, it's stupidly difficult to figure out what options are available, their pricing, etc and to configure a car. Oh no, you have to visit the dealer to know all that. Bullshit, the dealer's doing it online, why can't I?

Had a loose headboard near the sunroof. Had an appt and fixed inside of a week. I'm sure there's outliers as there would be with any high volume product but I find it suspect that these type of things wouldn't get sorted out in warranty.

For what it's worth I've seen much worse. Our last tractor we bought didn't have a driveshaft connected(!) so 4WD was kaput. Once that was sorted someone put a bell housing on in reverse so it was making a lovely metal-on-metal sound(!). This is all from a very well regarded brand and a high volume dealer. Screw ups happen but unless you're dealing with a fly-by-night company they'll get sorted out since everyone hates bad press.

But this is the same community that didn't see the Theranos fraud, either. Blind eye for Silicon Valley.

I told them I don't mind paying money but at very least they should be giving something actually useful like tinted window or Satellite radio. They guy starred at me with blank.

It is mind boggling that even mega brands like Honda are not able to tame these snake oil salesman. Honda literally gives away monopoly over entire region to them. Can't they simply require them not to engage in these practices? Why is this so hard?

No haggling, no visiting dealers, just email and signing some papers.

The entire bullshit process begins when you try to get a price that doesn't have thousands of extra dollars in for the dealership.

Simply visit the dealer, get through exactly the model you want, be reasonably interested (but not too much in love), ask for a quote, leave some contact details and leave.

Never answer and come back in about a month with a cheque when they've bidded themselves 20% down without you even saying a word.

I guess you could just multiply by X dealers and use the same "time is on my side" approach.

However, especially as you get to luxury brands and buyers aren't trying to get to minimal prices, I expect the "dealer experience" gets better.

This was "Here's the price excluding title transfer including delivery"

1. Call the dealer and ask for the internet sales manager.

2. Tell the manager exactly what you want (many people are not able to do this accurately and consistently).

3. Ask for the out-the-door price.

4. Repeat for any number of dealers that you are willing to drive to.

5. Buy from the dealer you choose.

I usually get several quotes within $100 or so of each other. At that point, I just pick the place with a low price and in a location that I prefer to pick up my car.

Buying a car and medical billing are the sleaziest businesses I have ever dealt with.

Turns out almost all Subaru dealerships in SW WA are owned by the same owner under different names so they just coordinate to not deal unless they know they're actually competing for a sale.

Tesla doesn’t do that. It’s a fixed price. Although I wouldn’t drop 35-50k on a new vehicle for their base models, I respect Tesla for eliminating the hassle of working with dealers.

90% of the games begin when you finance the vehicle at the dealership. Don't want to put $2000 down? Let's just add another year to the term. Or how about we add $50 / month to the payment? I watched in shock as salesmen would come back with increasingly worse offers in terms of total cost and customers would leave happy thinking they were great negotiators.

Americans are shockingly bad at math.

It's good to research what the invoice price is, but this isn't their actual cost. Manufacturers offer incentives to dealerships based on all sorts of things, including hitting certain sales goals. These rebates aren't factored into the invoice price, so even buying at invoice isn't always an amazing deal. My understanding is that the rebates/incentives are bigger with some manufacturers than others, but I don't know the details.

https://clark.com/cars/eye-opening-truth-about-dealer-invoic...

With the two new cars I have bought so far I paid substantially under invoice both times. Seems a made up number to me.

I also paid cash each time and they begged me to finance for three months so they would get more incentives from the manufacturer.

So, some legwork with a throwaway email address, but still very sofa compatibile.

How about a subscription / lease deal where they ship you the new model every year? Sell a cheaper tier for the 2nd year used vehicles. Do telemetry on driver safety and charge accident-prone drivers more! Replace/bundle/improve car insurance while you're at it. Are there regulatory hurdles preventing this for a company like Ford or Toyota? Is it just organizational momentum stalling these changes?

edit: as per this comment, seems i was wrong about this just being regulators saying no by default: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18772642

You certainly do not live in Michigan then.

Of course, they did try to get us to buy a bunch of pointles s addons and insurances, so it was annoying to have to say "No" over and over again to those.

"Hurry, if you don't close the sale now on this vehicle it won't be there tomorrow."

...

"Oh, the vehicle you called for? Sorry we just sold the last, we only have the model with X and Y options right now. We could order the one you wanted but it won't be there until next month. Don't worry, I'll make you a deal, it will only cost you [original price * 1.5] and you will have all of those fancy useless options right now! We are friends here, you are lucky I don't offer that deal to just anybody."

That and trying to have you believe that paying cash for a used car will hurt you.

"Oh, you have $7k in your pockets for that used car we have on the lot? Keep your money! We offer such a low interest rate. Use that money for something you truly care about and leave with the car anyway! No, really... I would feel bad to take this money from you. Here, sign this and the car is yours." ... Loses all semblance of false friendship ... "Oh, you really want to pay cash? Alright. Let me call my supervisor and he will close the deal for you."

I called three dealerships in my area and confirmed if they still had the vehicles I’d seen in their inventory on their website. They did and wanted me to come down immediately. I gave my email address and asked if we could continue over email. I made clear I wanted to settle in the final out the door price and I would come ready to purchase.

All three sent me promotional material over email. When I inquired about the final out the door price, one ghosted me, and the other two stated I would have to come down because it depends. One of them finally emailed me again with a full quote and OTD price including all taxes.

I went into the dealership where the salesman kept playing a game of going back and forth with me and the sales managers office. You see, he could not offer the original OTD offer, as it did not include some paperwork fees, delivery fees, and one other item, that pushed the cost up by another $1200.

I told him I’d honor the OTD cost he quoted me. So he walks to his manager, comes back, goes back, comes back, with me flat out declining each time.

This went on for an hour until I left. I gave my final price and then just got up to leave. The sales person changed tactics and tried to get me to take another car which had another 10k miles for about $500 less, which I didn’t want.

I then spoke to one other dealer over the phone who called me back within a day with the OTD price for a new Civic. I went to the dealership, but oh no! They just sold that car. They want me to look at an Accord instead. I leave.

A new bait and switch technique I saw with a friend. Once they had him interested, they changed the location of the vehicle on AutoTrader to be about 250 miles away (so it wouldn't show up in default searches) and they could claim "they didn't have it any more" (and then of course say "no, you're mistaken, it's not that price", or "I'm not seeing the car you thought you were looking at...").

We shouldn't have been flagged as non-serious buyers because we have plenty of money to buy the cars we were looking at, live in an expensive town, and we weren't looking at fun-to-drive cars. We were about to have our first child and were going to buy a family car. And we drove onto the lot in a new car that we'd just purchased!

Nonetheless, the reps only wanted us to see one vehicle. Only after insisting did they let us see a second vehicle (and at the Hyundai dealership we were literally shown this one by the janitor, not a sales rep).

We were so turned off by the whole experience that we ended up buying our subsequent vehicles used from individuals. I'm sure I'll buy a new car again someday, but I don't look forward to the process.

The buying experience was ok. Negotiating the price was annoying but I called a bunch of places for quotes, asking each one to beat the last one, and stopped when they started to say they couldn’t. Everything was fine until much later when I was buying my next car and trading this one in. Turned out the dealer had filed a lien with their finance division even though I bought the car outright. Just finding the right person to contact was a major pain. (Toyota Financial had to do the work to release the lien, but they wouldn’t do it for me. The dealership had to ask them.) Once I did, I had to call repeatedly to get them to move with any sort of speed. (I discovered this problem on Monday and was trying to buy on Tuesday.)

I realize this is not the typical experience, but it certainly left me eager to see the whole dealership system burn to the ground.

Our city is particularly predatory in that regard so I can expect a couple every year even though I drive only once a week.

The most time-intensive part of this process was signing all the paperwork, and playing telephone games with an insurance agency.

I'd still, for all the obvious reasons, prefer to shop and buy on-line.

If you're buying used, I would recommend to never bother with dealers. Buy from a local private seller.

I've also heard CarMax is OK but I have no first hand experience with them.

And I had pretty good experience buying my car via a site where I could configure it online, get price from a dealer (online), come in, see them honor this price (which was not the best possible but quite ok) and get a car without an exhausting sleazy spiel. Unfortunately, this was years ago and the site that did it is long dead.

I still think it was a great model, however I can understand how families like mine buying a new car once per 10 years (maybe) or so can't sustain a viable business model, while sleazy car salesmen deliver the $$$$, so however I hate this, they have much better chance to survive than honest and customer-friendly buying experience.

I am in Silicon Valley and I have been doing fine on public transit for several years now even if I ignore the very occasional rental [taxi, uber &c, car rental].

What "most of Silicon Valley" are you meaning? Is there an element of "what I want where I want when I want at a moments notice" in your statement? Something else I'm not understanding that necessitates me owning a personnel vehicle?

Within a short distance of San Francisco, I presume? Do you have a family? Kids?

> What "most of Silicon Valley" are you meaning?

Anything not within short distance of BART station, basically. All of San Jose, Cupertino, Campbell, Los Gatos, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto (excluding maybe Stanford campus), Santa Clara, Milpitas, Morgan Hill, etc.

> Is there an element of "what I want where I want when I want at a moments notice" in your statement?

If by "moment's notice" you mean getting somewhere within 30 mins vs. getting there in three hours, if you're lucky and no mass transit failure happens - then yes, "moment's notice".

> Something else I'm not understanding that necessitates me owning a personnel vehicle?

Yes. It's literally not possible to do simplest things - like buying groceries, getting to doctor's appointment, going to work, eating out (and I don't mean Michelene starred restaurants, I mean local sushi joint within 2.5 miles of your house), etc. - using public transit in most of SV unless you are prepared to spend literally hours on commute, and you're good at walking distances. If you're lucky to live in SF, some parts of Berkeley/Oakland, etc. - possible. If you live in San Jose and have a family - nope.

Three hours specifically on transit ... there is something "going wrong" such as being very far away and/or lack of planning. I assume you remember that some form of car-rental exists [the Uber-Lyft, Enterprise, Taxi, &c]; if your lifestyle really does need such things on a regular basis, then yes you "need" to own a personal vehicle. Otherwise, clearly no you do not.

And for the simple things... the average person literally cannot walk or transit for a restaurant or grocery [food deserts aside]? What have I been doing for these exact activities? And again you talk about spending hours upon hours to get somewhere not far away; do you read schedules or is your schedule that tight and urgent?

Again, ripping on San Jose//Campbell transit. You'll see me on VTA lite rail and buses being on time where I need to be. Will I be seeing you on a sidewalk confused in wonder?

Here you go. Most of SV isn't.

> I assume you remember that some form of car-rental exists [the Uber-Lyft, Enterprise, Taxi, &c]

Relying on taxi for mundane day-to-day movements maybe ok for people way richer than me, but for me it would be several thousand dollars per month - way more than I could afford. And way more than I spend on a car, including the purchase price.

> the average person literally cannot walk or transit for a restaurant or grocery [food deserts aside]?

Yes. There is maybe 2 or 3 restaurants within walking distance of me, and by walking I don't mean 1.5 blocks, I mean at 15 minutes. And by "restaurants" I mean anything including McDonalds. If you, like me, don't want to eat in McDonalds, closest decent restaurants are about half an hour walking. Sometimes we do walk there, but it's not for every weather and every mood. And if you want something like going to a brewery to get couple glasses of beer, that'd be an hour hike. Or a short drive. And as for groceries, one grocery store in 15 mins walk. Good luck walking there. Under rain. Or scorching sun. With groceries. Nope, no thanks.

> You'll see me on VTA lite rail

If you live next to it and everything you need also is next to it, you're in luck. Look at the map and see how much of the SJ territory it covers - and how much it does not. Vast majority of people live in "does not" territory.

> Will I be seeing you on a sidewalk confused in wonder?

Nope, you'd be seeing me driving past you, getting where I need to get an hour earlier than you :)

What an ignorant comment.

A huge portion of dealerships are small business owners in small towns. Honest, middle class people who care about serving customers.

This is all beside the point that Tesla has in no way proven their system works. In fact, as time goes on they are adopting dealer methods. There's a reason for that; people want to deal with locals.

My comment reflects my experiences.

Considering your comment history attacking Tesla in this larger thread in favor of dealers and this particular comment, I assume you are affiliated with some dealer.

Calling me ignorant doesn’t solve any problem. If you are a stakeholder in a dealership business, try raising the bar a bit and provide an honest, hassle free and upfront experience to your customers. By attacking a frustrated customer (who isn’t a customer anymore because of the crooked sales tactics), you’re not helping your case.