Earl Stewart on Cars - 01.23.2021 - Your Calls, Texts, and Mystery Shop of Bev Smith Toyota

Episode Date: January 23, 2021

Earl and his team answer various caller questions and responds to incoming text messages. Earl’s female mystery shopper, Agent Lightning visits Bev Smith Toyota in Fort Pierce to see if the dealer will honor the promotional price for a 2021 Toyota Highlander XLE on their website. Earl Stewart is the owner of Earl Stewart Toyota in North Palm Beach, Florida, one of the largest Toyota dealerships in the southeastern U.S. He is also a consumer advocate who shares his knowledge spanning 50+ years about the car industry through a weekly newspaper column and radio show. Each week Earl provides his audience with valuable tips that prevent them from "getting ripped off by a car dealer". Earl has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, Business Week, and other major publications. He has also made numerous appearances on CNN, Fox News, CBS, and other news networks. He is frequently called upon by local and national media to comment on major trends and newsworthy events occurring in today’s rapidly changing auto industry. You can learn more by going to Earl's videos on www.youtube.com/earloncars, subscribing to his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/earloncars, his tweets at www.twitter.com/earloncars, and reading his blog posts at www.earloncars.com. Sign up to become one of Earl's Vigilantes and help others in your community to avoid getting ripped off by a car dealer. Go to www.earlsvigilantes.com for more information. “Disclosure: Earl Stewart is a Toyota dealer and directly and indirectly competes with the subjects of the Mystery Shopping Reports. He honestly and accurately reports the experiences of the shoppers and does not influence their findings. As a matter of fact, based on the results of the many Mystery Shopping Reports he has conducted, there are more dealers on the Recommended Dealer List than on the Not Recommended List he maintains on www.GoodDealerBadDealerList.com”

Good morning. I'm Earl Stewart. I welcome you to Earl Stewart on Cars, a live talk show all about how to buy, lease, maintain, or repair your car without being ripped off by a car dealer. With me in the studio is Nancy Stewart, my wife, co-host, and a strong consumer advocate, especially for our female business. We also have Rick Kearney, an expert on how to keep your car running right. I dare you to ask a question that Rick can't answer about the mechanics or electronics of your car. Also with us as my son, Stu Stewart, our linked to cyberspace through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Periscope. Stu is also the Spymaster Director of our Mystery Shopping Report. He dispatches our secret shopper weekly to an unsuspecting South Florida dealership. And now, on with the show. Good morning, everybody.

We're back, your auto expert. I guess you call us our auto critics, auto dealer critics team. You heard in the introduction. Our purpose in life is to help you navigate the minefield on the car dealerships all over the world primarily in the United States, although we are international.

Buy a car, we try to keep you out of trouble. And I think I've got to turn my microphone around. Oh, she's got to turn her microphone around. Okay, we're good. We rely on you heavily to make this show of success,

and that is because you're calls make the show, and we mean that. We wouldn't be here if you didn't call the show. When I say call, I mean in the broad term, I'm saying we're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on Periscope, we're on YouTube, we're all over, cyberspace, and of course, a good old-fashioned radio, and we take calls, and we take text,

and we take anonymous feedback. We've got a special line you can call in figuratively speaking, anonymously. That's anonymousfeedback.com. You're actually, you're anonymousfeedback.com. Y-O-U-R, A-N-Y-M-O-U-S, Feedback.com. We'd like to hear from you. We already have, when we sit down to the show,

we already have a little bit of a backlog. But we like the calls. The calls are important, and we have a call-in number that is pretty popular. Last week we had a whole bunch of calls. and Nassie is pointing at me with a pencil. I'm whaling at you with my ballpoint. Hey Howard, I know you're there.

Can you hang on for a moment? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Back to the recovering card. Okay, very good. So there we got a caller. And it's Howard.

I'm going to give that number out for the folks. Howard's got the number memorized. And he's one of our favorite and most reliable callers, very informative. But if you haven't called the show before, write this number down. You might not be interested at the minute, but five minutes, ten minutes, maybe. We're on for two hours. You might want to call when something piqued your interest. 877-960-99-60.

That's 877-9-60. And the text line, we get more anonymous feedbacks now than we do text. But the text number, if you prefer to text, is there code 772. 497-6530. That's 772-497-6530. And we're gonna go right to Howard because the callers on the regular phone line, we don't like to keep them holding, and that's the reason Nancy raved to get my attention

because if you hold too long, we build up a backlog and then people call them, they get a busy signal. So if you call in, if you want to get fast, call on the regular phone line, 877-960, 960 9960 just like Howard just did good morning Howard good morning I hope you all well beautiful day today actually yesterday was a nicer day the ocean was flat I was able to swim which is not too usual you know in Florida sometimes the waves are too high and you've got critters in the water but yesterday was beautiful oh nice so let me

let me ask these questions to Rick Seat covers. I was told by someone, I remember who, that the seat covers, if you put seat covers on your car, a modern car, you have a problem with the airbags. Is this correct, Rick? It's possible. Newer cars have airbags built into the seat, usually on the side towards the door. So what does that? done is the companies that make these aftermarket seat covers put a special stitching on that section to where if the airbag is going to deploy, it simply pops it right apart. So it's perfectly safe as long as the seat covers that you get, say on the packaging, that they're safe for seat airbags. Great question, Howard. I hadn't even thought about that. I've run seat covers on my trucks since 97.

I always run seat covers on them. You go to Walmart and you get any seat cover laying around and you put it on and you could have a problem. Well, but 99% of them, especially here in the U.S., they're perfectly safe to use. Yeah, but they come from China here for them.

Yeah, but even so, they're designed to where they can do, you know, they can handle the airbags. And trust me, I've deployed airbags before as part of the job. And when those things pop out of that seat, that little bit of fabric isn't going to slow it down at all. Those things come out with some force. Oh, great. Okay. My next question for Rick, after you have your tire fixed with a patch in the inside, do you have to have it rebalance? Well, it's kind of

It's kind of an interesting question because if you put the tire back on the wheel, a good technician will watch for this, if you put the tire back on the wheel in the exact same position, it's still going to be in balance because you're not moving the tire around on the wheel so the heavy spots are not changing and you actually can recheck the balance and they come out right in right at zero. Interesting. I just, I tell you what, Howard, you got some great questions. some great questions. I've just learned two things here that I even thought about. And Rick hit it on the head. He said, be sure you find a qualified technician because you just throw a kid on the on the tire rack and say, okay, I want you to rotate it. All you got to do is take these tires off and move them around and put them back on again. You're going to have to have a balance problem because he probably didn't put them on the same way to take them off. I didn't know about that.

It's all about finding good technicians. Well, it's putting the tire back on the rim. Yeah. But yeah, and that's, you know, it's all about learning, and we teach our guys right. I teach them every trick I know to save time and make the job easier. What do you put a chalk mark on the tire on the rim? Absolutely. Yeah, there you go. Well, you put it where the valve is, right? Yep.

I put a little chalk mark where the tire valve is, so that way I know that I put line it right back up at the exact same spot. Yeah, but a lot of the technicians won't tell you that. and they want to get the extra money for you to balance the tire again. No, because a tire patch, actually a lot of shops, tire shops, don't even charge to repair a tire. But those that do, it's simply one flat fee. So the technician, his job is to make sure that tire is balanced when he puts it back to your car.

And so if you get a tire repaired and you go driving and you feel that tire starts bouncing because it's out of balance, and you go back and say hey you know now it's out of balance they're going to balance that tire for free for you so the tech's got to do double duty so yeah he's going to do it right the first time or he should okay that yeah this is very important if you explain to the audience why you should not have a tire plugged plugs are actually not safe because when you push a plug into the rubber of the tire. It's supposed to seal to the tire, but they never do. And over time, pushing that plug in through also spreads the steel belts apart a little more. It causes

more damage, basically, to the steel belts in the tire. And when you do that, you're creating a weak spot. So as the tire heats up, especially on highway speeds, that thing can fail and possibly just start leaking or, worst-case scenario, a blowout. The actual blowout, I heard it starts leaking, but I never heard of a blow-it. That's good information. It's a rare possibility. Yeah, it's a possibility. That's why it's always safest to do an internal patch that properly repairs the tire

and done by a qualified tech that knows whether it's safe to repair that tire or not. Okay, and that point, safe to repair the tire, how close to the sidewall should you not be to repair the tire? If the hole itself is anywhere in the last section of tread, I will not patch the tire, or if the nail or screw that went in, went at an angle to where the inside hole is too close over to that sidewall, I will not repair it. Can you explain why? Because the sidewall flexes and a patch on the inside that is on a flexible spot like that can fail. It can actually be pushed away because of the flexing of the sidewall of the tire. Okay, now I got something that you won't be able to answer. I'm sure you won't be able to answer.

years ago before you had the tire pressure on the dashboard telling you, you would have to go outside, take a look at your tires, or your car would not be riding correctly, and you go out and you see one tire is flat. There was one item that you could get that you would not have to actually have any. doubts that your tire was flat or it was losing air right you know what that was you could buy this in Walmart or you could buy it in any you know automotive store I'll give

you a hint that has some to do with these valves are you talking about those little valve stem caps that had the little color piece inside that would show green yellow or red for the tire pressures you're amazing you know everything you know how many people don't even know that. It's a visit at one time. By the way, it's off the market. You can't get this anymore. Right, because the biggest drawback to those was that if you didn't get a good quality set of them, they'd start leaking, and then you'd have flat tires all the way around. It's amazing. Rick, you're the greatest. And with that, I'll say, have a good day. Thank you, Howard. You're the greatest. Thank you.

Okay. Enjoy Florida. Okay, that's, you know, it's so nice to get questions that I know, if I don't know the answer to a question, and I've been in the business too long, a whole lot of people out there didn't know the answers. So there's some very valuable lessons. One thing across my mind talking about plugs and repairing on the side wall with the patch when you can't do that, why is it legal? Is there any such thing as you think that there could be a law, some sort of federal law, making it illegal to do something that we know to be unsafe.

There should be laws against it, but the drawback is how would you enforce that because it's not like you could take the tire off to inspect it and see the passion. Same thing is true of any law. The enforcement is the name of the game, but you dissuade honest people with laws, the dishonest people, they're going to break it anyway,

but better to have the law and not have the law. Okay, well, 877-960-99-60, and 772-497-6530, and I'm going to introduce Nancy Stewart, my co-host, and she's been with us, I say with us. She's been part of the founders. She's, Nancy and me, going back about 20 years, we've been doing this show. And she's a very strong female advocate. She's built our show to a parody with female sex, 50-50. We're right at parity right now, and we have a lot of female colors, and they should be,

because they buy actually a little bit more than half of the cars. It's amazing. I don't know why that is. 51%. I mean, I think that's the statistic, and they bring the cars in for repair as often or more. So, Nancy, tell them about the special offer we got for those gals. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Earl Stewart on cars, in case you just tuned in. I don't think it's a secret that, well, women dominate this auto industry.

And with that said, the first two new lady callers, we give you a little incentive, and that is $50 for the first two new lady callers. So take advantage of that and give us a call, share with us your experience in purchasing a vehicle, whether it's new, used, or maybe you came in for service, or maybe you'd just like to give us a call. 877-960-99-60. That's 877-960-99-60. And don't forget throughout the show, you can text us at 772-497-6530, if you're just a little bit shy. And I'm sure everyone by now saw Earl's hat that he's wearing.

And that is to celebrate www.orghumelantees.com. you can go right there and you can volunteer and help us round up all these cowboys, I guess, if you want to call. I'll get your hat just like this. And that too. I know there's hats and I think there's T-shirts to come, but you can help out your community and you can expose these dishonest car dealers. So that's www.orgelsvigilandies.com. And don't forget your anonymous feedback, youranonymous feedback.com.

We are going to go to George, who's calling us from Pennsylvania. Good morning, George. Good morning. How are you folks today? We're doing well. Hey, I had a comment on your tire patch slash plug caller. In Pennsylvania, it is illegal to plug the tire. Well, great. It relies on the mechanics' honesty.

Well, congratulations to Pennsylvania. Florida should do the same thing, all states. Thanks for the heads up, George. Yeah, plus the fact that here, about a year and a half ago, I put it in a set of tires on my old sion with aluminum wheels. And they had a double time getting old ones off. Last winter when the temperatures dipped, got a low pressure, tire pressure warning.

Filled the tires up with air, it was fine until this winter. Every couple weeks, the tire pressure monitor light would go off. I took it to my candidate for inspection this week, and he dismounted the tire. We found a lot of corrosion on that rim. I had six leaps around the bead of the tire. so when anybody gets a new set of tires, especially with aluminum wheels, make sure that guy

leaves the rims well good. That's it. Very good. I'll tell you, a valuable input. Thank you, George. Okay, thanks. Please call again. I'll tell you what, we're really bad

in 1,000 on informant of interesting callers, and Howard and George, thank you, and anybody out there that wants to call or text or anonymous feedback or Facebook or Twitter, please do so. We haven't heard from Stu Stewart, my son, and he's our Cybermaster,

and he's in charge of our mystery shopping report. Maybe he can give us a little bit of a sneak preview of what's coming up in the latter part of the show. I never want to give away too much. No, not too much, not. We did go at Mystery Shop, a Toyota dealership this week, and I want to give our usual, or else's usual caveat, is it makes us uncomfortable.

We are, we have a Toyota dealership, and we do not want to come across as taking shots at our most immediate competitors. But this dealership is, it doesn't directly compete with us. It's up in Fort Pierce. That's about an hour drive away from our dealership. And it's run and partially owned by a very colorful character named Frank Gonzalez, who is a really nice guy, but does kind of embody an older style of car sales. That said, he also has a very modern website,

and he does all the high-tech stuff. But we've had some, we've had good and bad from Frank Gonzalez's dealers. I use the term old school. He is, and he's doing business the way I did back in the 60s. So I can't really, I can't really criticize it because I've been there and done that. And what he does is typical old school.

Who remembers the movie Cadillac Man? Oh, yeah. Robin Williams. Tim Robbins. Yeah, kind of like the Cadillac man's style of doing business, and we love Frank. He is a great guy, and he's just, he's locked into the 60s and 70s. The 1960s, 1970s. We're trying to attain the 2060s level. Yeah, right. What a classic.

But, yeah, he is a good guy, but we've had some, you know, ups and downs and different times. types of results. I do reference in the beginning part of the report the last time that we shopped, sorry, Beth Smith Toad up in Fort Pierce. They had a pretty, I'll just say, it's a pretty distasteful ad, kind of playing up on, this was during the beginning of the pandemic, and so a lot of car dealers were trying out new hooks because at that last year this time, car sales was really bad. So we'll take a look, see how he cleaned up, or if he stayed the same we don't know but you'll find out in the second half of the show very good okay um i want to ask you question i should ask you before the show but are we are we using the grading

system on the it's not live yet um it's we have to build a new site and then we're going to link everything to that so then once we have the new site finished uh then we'll link to that from erlon cars and we'll also have a direct link that people can use to go to the site directly yeah um once again uh let's go back to this uh vigilante that Nancy talked about before and we are, we have, don't take the word vigilante in the negative sense. Vigilante is, can be a negative term, but vigilantes were originally established many years ago because we did have a dereliction of law enforcement. We didn't have enough law enforcement. And if you go back a couple hundred years in our history,

there were areas of the country where we had no law enforcement. So it became a necessity to have some sort of peace and quiet and calm and safety in your community, and they formed vigilantes. So I'm using the vigilante in that respect at the name Earl's vigilantes. Because we have a lot of laws on the book to protect consumers, but most of them aren't enforced. In Florida particularly, we have a law that says, if you have a hidden fee

that you don't put in the price of your car, it has to be included in the advertised price. That's a law. Virtually every car dealer in Florida breaks that law. So what good are laws if you don't enforce them? And there we are. So vigilantes, that's one of the reasons that we need vigilantes. We need someone to call these violations to our attention

and call them the attention of the people that contact you. So you go on to earlancars.com and you have a, we all have, vigilantes.com. You can go to www.w.w.orgulansvigilantes.com. You can sign up, give us your name, you can submit a picture. We'll send you a hat just like this. I'm wearing right now, a little vigilante decal on the thing, and we will have you available to people in your area. If you're in Kentucky or Missouri or whatever area of the country your own,

if someone is interested in who's a good car dealer in this area, that would be your duty to help them. And if you can't answer it, you can direct them to her own cars.com or to call the show. In other words, you're a link between us and people that are going out into the Wild Wild West to try to buy a car. And that's what it is today, the Wild Wild West. And I would feel bad about using the term vigilantes.

I picture Clenice would impale writer. You know, he's a hero, but he was a vigilante. Yeah, I like that. And, you know, it would be great to have volunteers from so many locations. That would be a bonus just to see. We need thousands. Really, it's going to cost us a lot of money. I have to, but we need thousands because people don't travel more than about 30 miles, 20 or 30 miles to buy a car.

So if you divide the country up into a grid of 30-mile-an-hour diameter, that's a lot of vigilantes. Yeah, exactly. And we need more and more and more. We have a lot of states that aren't even represented. In fact, in Florida, how many do we have now, two or three, three or four? In Florida, no, I think we have five or six in Florida. Five or six. Okay, we're getting there.

All over the state, from Gainesville down to Miami. And, you know, I have to not make light of this topic, but the way the mystery shopping reports are running. You almost feel like as if that you're the lone ranger here in Florida, but we have to address the good, the bad, and the ugly. And every location we can reach, and you, the listener, the volunteer, can help us out in so many ways. So, www. www. Earlsvigilantes.com. And you don't have to be an auto expert. Forget that.

You can just be concerned. Yeah. Let's go to what, Rick, he's got a YouTube over there. We do have one. Don Brown is asking. He says, I'm curious if insurance companies may write a check to a collision customer for a smaller amount and then go to the at-fault driver's insurance company and get a much larger amount from them. I have to plead ignorance. Alan Napier, our collision expert, if you're listening, read that again.

And then we'll see what, because I don't understand that. I'm guessing what he's really asking is, if you're in an accident and someone else is at fault, and you go to your insurance company. Yeah, I think I can answer that. It's called, is it called abrogation? It's basically the two insurance companies work it out legally. In some cases, your insurance company would sue the insurance company of the at-fault driver with the idea that they don't want to pay anything. So you might not even be, they might. I can recoup the whole thing from the asphalt driver.

I don't know if that's always successful. And if Alan is listening, he probably can have some more nuances. But I think that's what he's referring to. But nobody's getting taken advantage of, are they? I mean, the insurer. I think what he's asking is, say, if I have State Farm and somebody hits me, that is Allstate, and State Farm repairs, pays to repair my car for, say, $10,000, can they get Allstate to pay them $12,000? And then they get to keep the difference.

I don't believe that. Yeah, I don't know if they can do that, but they will go for the other at-fault driver into each other. Right, right. But I can't imagine that the law would, it was a pretty strong regulation on insurance companies, and to allow them to collect more money for an accident than the insured collected. Yeah, I don't think the amounts, that's kind of, that, I don't think that would be, would happen. But they do, yeah, they, I mean, they don't just pay it out automatically if they're going to try and recoup as much as they can if someone's in fault. That was the substance of the question.

Right. He was wondering, could insurance company A make a profit from insurance company B by making them pay more for the repairs than what the client got? That's a very interesting question. Yeah, I say the answer is no. And if someone wants to correct us, Alan called in and let us know or anybody. But I don't believe that the insurance regulators would allow that to happen. Okay.

Yeah, it'd be great to hear from Allen. Boy, what a complicated industry, insurance, car insurance. It's just that you've really got to. keep your eyes open and keep investigating, you know, what you're being charged and change policies if you need to. 877-960, or you can text us at 772-497-6530. And as I mentioned earlier, Your AnonymousFeedback.com. We may have some texts. We've got a whole bunch of them.

Some on your anonymous feedback, so we'll go to Stu. Yeah, let's kick it off with one from Anne-Marie. She just sent it in here. I don't know if Jonathan will be able to get a picture of what she sent on screen. I sent over to Rick to take a look, but she sent a visual aid. So Anne-Marie says, good morning. I hope everyone stays safe on this soggy, foggy morning. I've owned cars for 50 years, and I've never seen this before, so I'm hoping you can help.

Here is a picture of the roof edge of a 2013 Camry. The exterior weather stripping over the front passenger seat by the top of the windshield has started to pull away from the track that it sits in, and the prongs that hold it in place are now showing. I tried pushing the weather stripping back into place. That didn't work. Here are my questions. One, could this cause a leak inside the car? And two, what can I do to fix it?

Superglue, clear flex seal, and that's from Anne-Marie. And I sent Rick the picture already. Without any help, he identified the actual part of the car. Well, that's his thing. There you go. First thing, no, that will not cause a leak in the car because there's no openings on the roof where it could go in. If it was to start leaking around the windshield seal,

that'd be another case, but no. That roof molding there is more just like a decorative thing. And what I would actually do is I would clean it really well and use a little bit of 3M weather. strip adhesive just to glue it back down and you can get that from any auto parts store and what I do is for Amazon yeah Amazon of course an excellent choice once you get it very well cleaned and you get the adhesive in there put something on top of it some heavy books or something sort of a

wait just to hold it down so it'll be pressed into place until that adhesive dries and that should solve the issue for you all right I'm sure Amher re-thanks you. Yeah, it looked like there was when it came up, you can see just kind of the dirt and debris that's collected there over the years. And so, yeah, definitely clean that out before you put any glue or any adhesive in there. Let's jump over the Facebook. We have another question for Rick. It's from Nate on Facebook. He's watching the live stream. This is good morning. I have a question for Rick. I have a 2016 Jeep Grand Cherokee with a V6 engine 85,000 miles. Lately, when starting my engine, it starts out with a somewhat rough idle that goes away. after being driven. But if I turn off the engine and restart it, even after being warmed up, it all just kind of rough again. Any ideas? Spark plugs are due at 100,000. Many thanks. The first thing I would try is clean the throttle plate. What's the throttle plate? Where the air filter comes to the engine, there will be a nice big hose that goes to the what's called the throttle body. And if you were to be able to look at it. And if you were to be able to look

inside you pull that hose away you can see inside there's a big metal plate there a round plate that when you have the throttle open this actually opens up like a big valve it just kind of turns sideways to let the air go into the engine is this is this something that Nate could safely do are you we remember we have 20 or 30 000 people listening out here do you think of something somebody should go into the hood and start taking things apart and cleaning if you're if you're reasonable do-it-yourselfer if you've got a little bit of experience with cars, you can do this very easily. Okay. The only thing you're really going to need is one of those 3M Scotchbright pads, like the scrubby stuff on the back of a sponge. Just be very careful. Don't drop it in the

engine. And basically, you're just going to open that plate up a little bit and scrub away the black carbon that builds up right around in there. And once you clean that up, odds are that car's going to to idle a whole lot smoother. Great. That's wonderful. I get nervous when I start taking things apart because I could take things apart very easily, but I can't put them back together as easily. That's like, that's the universe, you know. Entropy happens naturally. Well, the organization. The most of you're really taking apart is just the hose that goes on to the onto the throttle body. And that's usually just a single clamp. So you just pull that loose, working to the side a little bit, and just go in and scrub that clean. I believe in the

Hippocratic oath that says first do no harm and so sometimes I have a problem around the house Nancy's better than I am at fixing things but I sometimes start in on something to repair something and sooner I have a soon enough I have a much worse situation I started with. There are times where it's best to know your limitations and hire the pro. Exactly. Okay. Hey let me pull myself together here. Talking about all that stuff makes me nervous. Anyway, I just want to let everyone know that, you know, there are so many more educated listeners and consumers, and I have to say that Earl Stewart on Cars has really helped in so many ways. I believe that there are more people, listeners, consumers, that can pop that hood and do a little, as I call it, tinkering.

Nothing huge, but just general maintenance, as Rick, you know, as he so eloquently mentioned. So thank you all for listening. You are an important part of the show, and not only do you educate, but we're being educated by you. So we're going to go back. Let me give that number out 877-960, now back to Stu. Let's jump over to a text from Steve in New Jersey. It says, Hi, Earl. This is Steve from New Jersey.

Pray all will have continued good health. I received an orbital electric car polisher as a gift. It included a high-quality correction cream to buff out minor paint swirls along with a nice wax. Other than thoroughly washing my car, is there anything else I need to do to the paint before polishing it? Now, without Alan here, who could probably chime in, I think this is a sign that Alan needs to. make an appearance. I'm telling you. But I can tell you this.

I do have some experience in this because I wasn't always in the car business. I was in art and I do have some experience with paint. And also I took shop in middle school. There you go. But a cameo would be nice by Ellen. Absolutely. But absolutely cleaning it completely free of any type of grit or sand because you have one piece of sand in there that will scratch the hell out of your car.

The other thing is I would be really, really careful before trying an orbital polisher yourself. Red my mind. Because if you put, you can burn the paint. If you, if you, if too much friction gets in there, you can really mess things up. If you have experience with it and something you're comfortable with, then go ahead. But then you wouldn't be asking the question that probably should do the pain. Well, we see that all the time in our dealership. People try to fix things and they make them worse.

Yeah. And if you have a collision repair, body shop someplace that you can trust. Yeah. I get an opinion before you start doing something yourself. Or a professional detailer that uses. Yeah. Sometimes that scratch that's driving you crazy is actually nice looking compared to what you just did to your car trying to get rid of the scratch. Well, I've done that from personal experience using equipment like that.

And so, yeah, if you go too hard, you'll cause a very expensive situation that you've got to get fixed. All right, let's jump up here. This is from Joe, this is the text. So they just called Lexus, a Lexus dealership for an alignment. they wanted to know if I wanted front only or front and rear and never heard of that. Please explain, and how would you know if the rear was out of line? Well, there is a front alignment and a rear alignment. I thought

almost everything was all four wheels now. Rick knows the exact answer. Rick, when something comes in to sell one alignment, do we align two wheels or four wheels? Pretty much all cars are done now with a four-wheel alignment. That's what I thought. And as a matter of fact, the newest equipment now uses lasers and reflectors, so the measurements are incredibly precise. Sure. Did he mention the location or the Lexus deal?

I'm surprised that a, you know, what it might be, and I hate to disparage a car dealer. I guess I do, don't I? Lexus really surprises me that they would ask that question. I was going to say maybe they advertise the two-wheel alignment so they could bump them to the four-wheel when they really should have had a four-wheel in the first place. I think you hit the nail on the head. That sounds exactly what it is. I'm not sure what Joe's from. His area code is 4-40, which is in Ohio.

So I don't think it's local. I'd be very careful about that dealership. Lexus dealers are supposed to be more not above a reproach, but more so than most dealers. And I can't think of a single Lexus model. that would not require a four-wheel alignment. There you go. Okay, we're going to go to Rick, who's the first time. He's a first-time caller, and he's from Royal Palm Beach.

Welcome to the show, Rick. Thank you, Nancy. Thank you, Earl, Rick. My name is Rick. I have a 2013 Toyota Island that I've been taking for service for so many years, and it's got 150,000 miles. While I, when I go to the service center, I've never noticed or seeing any Toyota Tundra 6 lifts in the garage.

Is there any particular area that Toyota tells the owner where to go for these trucks to get service that are certified through Toyota? Well, Toyota does require in their service department to have the lifts and equipment to accommodate all the Toyota models. So when the larger Tundras came out, You know, prior to either dealers had to add these lifts so they can pick them up. If they didn't have them, they were required to put them in within a certain time period. I think that's what you're referring to.

I'm not sure. I don't know of any dealers that didn't do that, but I would surprise me. It would be an older dealership because we had to make that change 15, 20 years ago. Yeah, when we built the current shop that we have. I see. I don't know if a dealer is in financial distress, if the toy would give them a break on installing that stuff, I'm not sure. I would think they would recommend referring to another Toyota dealer because they're not going to send them to an independent or a non-toid dealership to do, especially to do warranty work. Yeah, because when I actually hear the service agents regarding that question, they take the trucks to, they pretty much can't answer my question.

I'd call a different Toyota dealership. Yeah. thanks Rick I appreciate the call thank you everyone God bless oh you're welcome stay safe have a great weekend Rick and hope to hear from you again 877 960 9960 and don't forget to read Earl's latest column again it's magnificent and it has you know a lot of information in it and its answers to the top 10 devious statements made by car salesmen So he really reduced that list. He only has 10, but I can imagine that there's enough to fill this room.

Well, exactly. He has to consider length, you know. A blog's a blog, you know. It's not a novel. There you go. The novel is for his follow-up book that he's going to write. He could have turned it into war and peace, but hey, we don't have that much time. But one of the many things is I'm sorry, but we just saw.

that car that we advertised that one before and we can't give you another one is we can't give you our lowest price until you tell me that you're ready to buy the car and take it home tonight and then you get then you go how am I supposed to know if I'm ready to buy the car no but if let's talk hypothetically if you were like come on man yeah game plan we got another text here I like this one it says it's from Antonio in Lauderdale Lakes. Antonio asks, you talk about your old and evil ways,

Earl. I used to sell cars in the 1990s, and we would make a big gross and say we really ripped their head off. Nice, I know. Do you remember your biggest grossing deal? We had several over $10,000 at my Chrysler stirred during my tenure. Not proud of it, but things like that were

celebrated. Oh, absolutely. I mean, $10,000 was a really, really good one, but we would have over $10,000. We had a slam dunk club, we called it, and if you had over $4,000 profit on a customer, you got Ruth Chris Steakhouse dinner for you and your wife, and a $500 bonus. We had bonuses for, you know, depending on how high the gross. It was all about... That was on top of a $1,000 commission, too. Yeah, a big, big fat commission. So when someone You talk about ripping your head off when someone comes in unprepared and unsophisticated,

maybe the first car or maybe they've never bought a car before, that's the victim. And they go after it and they'll make a $10,000 profit because the attorney that comes in two hours later and buys the same car, same year, make model MSRP, he pays maybe $500 profit or $100 profit. So the swing and the profit on the same car at car dealerships is huge. I mean, from, you know, a $5,000 swing is not uncommon. You don't want to be the one that pays the extra $5,000. You don't want to be that guy. No.

No, sorry, Bob. And some of the language used to describe these things are just, you know, you get slam-dung, home run. Those are the tame ones. But like Antonio said, ripped their head off. Yeah, ripped their head on. That is a, yeah, I don't know if that's, is that just the car. business is that is that in other industries or just it's just they hold the

customer in low regard another expression back in the day buyers or liars and they disparage the customer because it's easier to take advantage of and hurt someone that you don't like you take it back to war time okay in World War 2 we said terrible thing about the Japanese we call them names we said a terrible thing about any enemy we ever fought because if you disparage the enemy, it's easy to kill them. And if you disparage your customer, it's easy to rip their heads off.

And you talk to the average car dealer and the average car salesman, they don't like their customers. Buyers are liars? Liars are liars. That's an example. And what they mean by that is... I got a real chisler here.

If you go into a car dealership and you say, I got a lower price at another dealership, and the salesman will say, well, Mr. Jones says he got a lower price at our competition. and he'll say he's lying. But if you were lying, that's part of a negotiation game.

They're lying to you? Exactly. That's called bargaining and negotiating and hackling. That's what you have to do unless you are educated from Erwin cars on how to buy a car while they happen to go through that. It's the American way. We're going to go to West Palm Beach where Marty's been holding. Good morning, Marty.

Good morning. How are you today? We're all well. Thank you. I have a question. I've got a 20 Camry XLE, a fully loaded one. And when I was into your dealership for service a couple weeks ago, I looked at a 21. And the only thing I noticed was the screen is like, looks like an iPad. It's a little higher than the dash. question is is that the only change and is the only reason to make the change is to

make a 21 different than a 20 pretty much there it's the same body style and so there were some minor interior changes and that was one of them I don't know how you feel about the screen that seems to be the trend in all manufacturers that have this screen that seems to be floating in front of the dash and the future by the way I've seen these touch screens or these big LED screens are are going to cover the entire dashboard. I think Mercedes has one, and I read about another one that has literally, I think,

a 46-inch screen, the biggest one in the world. But I could be wrong, Marty, there could be some other minor changes, but overall it's roughly the same, and there wasn't a big price difference at all. Yeah, I personally like the screen that's in the dash in my 20. So I'm going to hang on to my 20. I haven't been, because of the pandemic, I haven't driven that many miles.

I've had it 11 months, and we've got 7,000 miles, so I'm not ready to trade it in anyways, but I haven't liked the screen and the dash. The reason that they say it's for is because it gets it a little bit closer into your line of sight to limit the amount of times you have to glance down and take your eyes off the road. So if they get that screen closer to the windshield area, you're just kind of glancing.

It does look weird. I've gotten used to it, but those screens are, those kind of strange look like they, you know, Velcroed an iPad to the dashboard. I understand why they're doing it, but we'll see what happens. The cars just keep on changing as we get more and more technology. Yeah, and in my wife's case, she's got a Camry also, but when it comes time for, she's, hers is on a lease, mine is a buy. The only thing is, in her case, she wanted a RAV-4-type car to try a different car.

And the RAV-4 has got the screen up here, too. But in Honda, CRV, that screen is in the dash again. So I hate to give up a Toyota, but I might be swayed into going into the Honda because she doesn't like that screen up in there. Well, she can't go wrong there because the CRV is, that's another great, car these the cars just keep getting better and I can't fall at Honda at all for their car I don't know if they're going to do with the interior design if that if they're going to follow that trend or they're just going to bucket but I think CRV is number one consumer reports for that for that type

of SUV yeah and I want to tell you another thing just on a Toyota dealer I was bringing my car in for an oil change once and a guy came in with a new Lexus and he got an oil change there So I said to the service writer, I said, well, why would a guy with Alexis come into a Toyota dealership? He said, because the same oil change is half the price at a Toyota dealer. That's a good point, Antonio. They really... It's a good advertisement for you. I do all my service at your place, but that's, you know...

Yeah, well, same thing holds true for Honda and Accura and for Infinity and Nissan and for Chevrolet. If you own a Chevrolet, take it to a Cadillac dealer. You own a Lexus, take it to a Toyota dealer. You own a Honda Accura, take it to a Honda dealer. You know, you say, it's like you say, it's about half the price in the service. Right, exactly, exactly. And I just checked Consumer Reports, Earl is that absolutely right? Both the Ravre 2, 2021 Ravre and CRV are recommended,

but CRV and 21 has a higher score. And I'm just going to tell you, one other point, far as a service thing. When I first got my 20 Camry, I had a couple days when the car wouldn't start. So I had a call at an automobile club, and it jumped in. It brought it into your dealership. The guy checked out the battery, and everything's fine.

They told me one thing. Make sure you step on the brake all the way down when you go to start the car and push the button. Since I've more conscious of that now, I've never had the problem again. So if anybody has that problem, it's one way. It's an easy fix. Thanks for that, Antonio.

Good tip. Marty, it was great hearing from you. Do you have another? You have another question? Is it a texter. I'm not Antonio, but that's fine. Marty, thanks for joining us this morning. You sound like an Antonio to me.

I don't know. Antonio has been done. Okay. All right. Have a good day. You too. Stay safe. You know, it's amazing.

Here we are on the 21st, and we're still talking about, gosh, I took my car, my Cadillac for service. I'm going to go way back in time to Schooley Cadillac. Wow, I paid an arm and a leg. Why isn't there more supervision? And that's a ridiculous question, I suppose. But why do you have to be charged? What you get charged?

And someone will say, hey, you could have taken that Cadillac over to the Chevy dealership and paid half of what you've paid to have your car service. That's because you're going to afford to pay. They know you got the money? That's an old answer. Yeah. I mean, you can a cup of coffee at the risk of Carlson and coach you a lot more than the holiday end.

Well, I, there isn't that feel good, you know. If there's more supervision, you'd pay more. I didn't feel as good as schooly as I did at the risk carton whenever I had a cup of coffee, just saying, okay back to stools okay let's jump over to another text here that's a great question how do you get cigarette smoke out of a car I bought a about a use civic that smelled great when I bought it put a month later the smoke smell appeared well I'll tell you what they did they had a stinky cigarette car and they deodorized it

and it's really really hard to get that out of a car I was gonna joke around say use some febrees but that's not gonna help you car dealers there's a ozoneing ozone treatment where there's actually a device that they put in the car overnight and it produces ozone that's supposed to you know eat the offending molecules or destroy the offending molecules that causes the odor

we've had mixed results with that. The fact of the matter is if you got a smoker car that smoke smell has never gone away I don't think is that right? Unfortunately yeah if it's well you think of the 24th century that finally figure out how to

well because it's no nicotine's nicotine The cigarettes of particles of tar are in the fabric and nooks and crannies, and you're never going to clean that out. It just sucks it in. But it's not only in the fabric itself in the seats, it actually goes past the fabric and into the phone of the seat. I would recommend this just to get a serious answer for the texture is, in addition to a deodorizing thing, shampooing the carpet, shampooing the seats, like a vacuum sort of thing, a professional detailer, a really thorough cleaning. you can make an improvement on the cigarette smell but it's always going to kind of be there

and you'll notice it on hot days when you get a smoker car by the way and this is, we'll just say this when we appraise one, someone's trading in and if it smells it really, really kills the value of the car because we know we've got the only people are going to buy the car

people don't possess a sense of smell What you do is you do a quick and dirty deodorization and you take it the auction Well that's what happened these guys Yeah another yeah Well not the oxy yeah You know, dealerships will spend some time, you know, a lot of time deodorizing that car, and it stays smelling clean for a short period of time.

But like Stu said, boy, oh boy, does your car depreciate? And if smoking is that important to you, step out of the car and do your thing. And when you get back in the car, just the smell from your clothing, your hands, your skin, everything, you're still going to get that inside the car and your car the depreciation is unbelievable I got some good advice so ask that question this needs to go on the list when you're buying a used car ask them if they did any deodorizing process to it

to try and remove any smells like cigarette smoke if they say yeah well what did you try to remove speak to the used car manager this is starting to sound like bagels huh I think yeah well it's I think I mean it is a real problem out there and you can really get surprised and think everything's fine Smelled car smells great. It smells like oranges, and that's what this deodorizer smells like.

I don't know what the cost might be, but you might also consider consulting a company like ServePro. They do cleanup for fire and water damage to home. They also do that for cars as well. Oh, do they? Interesting. All right, let's go to the next one. Why do car salesmen force you to wait to meet his manager before letting you go home? I don't want to meet your manager. I don't want someone taking another swing at me.

I'm not forced to meet anyone's boss when I buy other products. And that is true. It is a unique thing, I think, to the car business. Well, let me say this. So, you know, we are a dealer, and we have the same requirement. But, you know, there's a good reason for meeting a manager and a bad reason for meeting a manager. We want to be sure, and a good dealer will want to be sure that everything was okay. A bad dealer is going to use the manager to hammer you and try to close you and push you to buy the car when you don't want to.

At a good dealership or a good company, I think a lot of people are flattered that the manager or the owner or the general manager would take the time to want to be introduced to a prospective customer. But as Stu said, in most dealerships, the T.O., they call it the turnover, T.O. for slang, is to hammer the unsuspecting customer and the pressure that customer into buying a car. But it is not something that necessarily has to be bad. Supposing the salesperson didn't do a good job. Supposing that there was a problem in the chemistry between you and the salesperson, the sales manager should be able to inject himself. maybe finds you another salesperson or handle it himself it can be used to the benefit of the customer just like to the detriment yeah and then the question is why do they force you uh the point of the matter they should never force you never force the salesperson says hey do you have a minute like you to meet my manager and you said no i really got to go um they said it's only to take a minute and they say i really got to go no problem see you later but if they say i'm going to get fired if you don't meet my manager that's exactly you're in a very toxic uh environment why does it take so long to meet the manager i mean some In a busy day in a showroom, a manager room might have five deals that he's working with different salespeople and they might have to wait for them. Sometimes the waiting game is intentional. You get somebody waiting, it's supposed to wear them down or it's part of the whole pressure thing.

We see that a lot in mystery shopping. Okay. A lot of tactics. Yep. Okay, folks, 877-960-9960, and you can text us at 772-497-9-7-6-5-30. you still have time to give us a call. As I said earlier, you're a big part of the auto industry, and you can win yourself $50 this morning for the first two new lady callers.

Now back to Stu. Okay. I have a 2017, this is a text, I have a 2017 Honda CRV. The battery went dead at 1,200 miles. It was replaced under warranty. I had several incidents where the battery died over the next three years, but the battery was replaced. At 35,000 miles, the battery had to be replaced again.

I'm now out of warranty, and I just had another battery dying me. The dealer is not helping me. Is there an ongoing known problem that they don't want to tell me about? I'd be curious what battery they were replacing it with. If it was a factory battery, I'd be concerned if it was a battery that Honda routinely used, but if they were using a cheap battery, that would be a different story. I saw Googling going over there with Rick. Did you find any correlation between that particular Honda CRV, 2017, and batteries?

No, I was actually just answering another question on YouTube, but batteries are like anything. Sometimes you can get a bad one that will, or a bad batch that can fail easily. Four in a row? Four in a row, that sounds like there's something weird going on with the car. Four in a 35,000 mile period. Yeah, there's something wrong with the car. I see, I just Googled it, and, um,

Well, here's a search result. 2017 Honda CRV battery keeps going dead. CRV parasitic drains and battery charging problems. What are the 2017 Honda CRV battery? There is a problem here. And so if your dealer, your Honda dealer isn't willing, which doesn't make sense because they get paid, I try a different Honda dealer.

Well, there should be a technical service bulletin on that. It could be even goodwill. There could be, you might be entitled to some reimbursement. on those batteries. You should be, and maybe you are, but you have to ask sometimes. A lot of dealers don't know. A TSB technical service bulletin is a fairly common parlance on this. And a lot of dealers don't know what all their technical service bullets are. Unfortunately, there's a huge number of technical service bulletins, and the dealer won't tell you about it. You have to complain. So if you go into a Honda dealer and your batteries been going dead every 20,

minutes, you should tell him that. And then I would ask him if he didn't. He said, well, I don't know what's going on. He said, do you have a technical service bowl? Yeah, this guy needs to find another Honda dealership. I just search for a TSP. There is a TSP for the 2017 parasitic battery drain. So call someone else.

I don't think you're dealing with a competent deal. Write this down, folks. It's kind of like it's a hidden warranty. It's a dirty little secret between manufacturers and car dealers. T isn't Tom or T's. is in technical, S is in service, B is in Bolton, TSP. TSP is a secret warranty that the manufacturers put out when they know they have a problem with your car.

And they tell the dealer, don't tell anybody about it unless they complain. And that's to keep their expenses under control because they don't want the dealer selling something that the customer is not complaining about. So there you are. If you have a chronic problem, be sure you not only, asked them, but also asked them to check to see if they have

a technical service building on that specific issue. And, of course, what we did, Stu Googled it, and all you do is put in a battery problem, 2017, Honda CRV, and there you are. It pops up, and all the dirty laundry is aired, and you can see

exactly what's going on. Okay, next text. Hi, Erling, gang. Excuse me, before you get started on that text. We have Don, and he's a first time caller. and he's giving us a call from Palm Beach Gardens. Good morning, Dawn. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, I've called in a couple times before. I was a guy that had the GMC van with a bump chuggle fish bite. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Anyway, you're talking about tires this morning, and my question, or one of my pet teams, I don't understand why. They allow these semi-trailers and trucks to run these retread tires. They're coming apart, some of them pieces weigh up to 50 pounds or more, and they're killing people.

And I don't understand why they allow retread tires on these big trucks and trailer. I don't either. I see them, too, and I thought they were made illegal at some point, and apparently they're not. What do you know about that, Rick? The last I had ever researched on this, the legal issue is they can only be on rear axles. In other words, they can't be on the front of the vehicle. They have to be on the steering wheels. But yeah, retreads to me are, oh, I hate the whole idea, but the whole concept.

I used to ride a motorcycle, and I can tell you, when you are cruising along and a car near you suddenly kicks a piece of that into you, oh, boy, they're horrible. Well, I got a full race car trailer. I'm on the road a lot. And you run over one. They don't look so bad on the road, but when you hit one of them, they do terrible damage underneath these vehicles and trailers. Oh, yeah.

Like a motorcycle hit the, you know, you're going to wreck the bike and maybe get killed. And I don't get why they allow this. It's just crazy. Oh, it's just like porch and talk. You went after the cot airbags and had some success there. Maybe you can do something about these retread tires. Because you see all these dump trucks running around down here.

Yeah. Lots of them. They're all running retread tires on a bag. The answer is the trucking lobby on the legislatures. And that's, they want to keep their maintenance costs down. And they're willing to take a chance with your life and the driver's life and other people on the highway's life. It's just a damn shame, but it should be a federal law against plugging tires and against retreads on tires.

The states apparently have to take the responsibility upon themselves. We found out Pennsylvania makes it illegal to put a plug in a tire. In Florida, it's legal to put a plug in a tire. Go figure. Yeah, on our road, get plenty of hot. When these tires build up heat in the summertime, that's when they, you know, for the retread to fall off. and they're really dangerous. I hope they could do something about it.

Anyway, thanks for letting me call in and express my opinion. Thank you, Don. Thanks, Don. Have a good one. Have a great weekend. 877-9-6960, and you can text at 772-497-6530. And I mentioned again, ladies, I'm waiting for you to give us a call because you can win $50 for the first two new lady callers.

where there's so much going on on the roads that's illegal that nobody does anything about, which, as Don pointed out, can kill you. So, just fentane. Back to stew. Don also mentioned Takata, and it's been a long time since we talked about it. You saw in the news that Ford has been wrestling with the NHTSA, and they lost their wrestling match, and now they're calling 3 million Ford vehicles.

I think they're not that recent, I think 2012 to 2016 or something, like that that's a lot more takata cars on the road so I'm just warning you use car dealers out there we might be looking for takata cars in your inventory I can't find them anymore which is great but you know we got a bunch more that are going to have this recall when I saw that on the news on Thursday and I heard the word takata and I said oh wow takata I haven't mentioned that in a while all right I think we've had this a variation of this question before but we love answering it Hi, uh,

Hi, Erland Gang. First time listening to your show was last week. I caught you in time for your secret shopping report. Have you ever been sued for doing this?

And we love you asking that question because it proves we're honest people. There's probably more lawyers in South Florida per capita than any place in the world. Right. And if we had lied, boy,

oh boy, they would have come out after us, probably the radio station. and probably maybe me personally. I have a confession to me. There are some myths, truths in the shopping report. I will change the time of day, the weather, certain descriptions, because I'm trying to confuse the dealership listening

so they don't identify the shopper. So I might change up, you know, I was wearing a purple hat. It was a beautiful sunny morning, and it might have been at 7 o'clock at night. I don't think they can sue us because we're light about the time. That's great. All right. We're done with all the texts. We have some anonymous feedback, which is logged me out of the site here.

I think we can get in really quickly. Am I mistaken or did we have more text than normal? And usually we have more anonymous feedback from all. I haven't even gotten to the anonymous feedback. Yeah, no. So we're staying for another hour. Oh, we could get through a whole show on this. There's a bunch of them here.

So, yeah. I see, Rick. He wants to say, you want to stay, don't you? All right, the first one, I think, at first one I didn't understand, but it was a comment on something we were talking about last week. We had a caller that came in and had lost a key and wanted to make another key made for the car,

and it was really expensive. And then, you suggested getting a lawyer. And anyway, so this is the comment on that. So we read them all good and bad. So you think a lawyer is going to take the case, the missing $300 Porsche key? Give me a frickin' break. Only read it because it kind of had some rhythm.

Just like car dealers, there's good lawyers out there, and there's some good car dealers, but not enough of them. And sometimes lawyers do take cases because they get emotionally involved, and they feel like we need to teach this guy a lesson. Also, if a lawyer knows what he's doing, and a lot of them are pretty smart on that area, they work for attorney's fees. If you can go on to the Unfair and Decepti Trade Practices Act and sue somebody in any state for that, the Unfair and Decepti Trade Practices Act, they call it Fadupta in shorthand, you collect the, for the plaintiff, if you're the plaintiff, you collect your legal fees. So the lawyers don't go in it for the recovery. It might be a $100 issue.

You know, there might be a $50 issue, but you might have $50. $50,000 in attorney's fees. So the lawyer will call you up and say, listen, I'm going to sue you under the FDUCTA, the Florida Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practice Act, or you can give me

X number of dollars. And if you say no, then he says, good. And he starts the clock going, and he's making a fortune hourly every time he talks to you or his client. And that makes a lot more money for him than the collection. He doesn't even probably take a piece of the action,

when you get paid if you use that particular one. Remember that. If Florida deceptive and unfair trade practice is a act. You know, it's really unfortunate that, I mean, this past week, you and I were talking about the remote, and there was a customer that was really upset with the fact that they had to pay so much. And back in the day, you had to pay a lot,

but now it's totally obscene. And I asked myself, why can't there be some control over that? I mean, you're going to, you lose your remote, and it's going to cost you $800 to get your remote replace. That's a little bit of a drug, you know, I am, well, anyway, another vent. On to Stu. Yeah, sometimes just a letter from a lawyer that you don't picture a jury trial guy. It's like it just might be a letter from an attorney, and the used car manager or whoever's getting the letter might go, hey, that's a little intimidating, and they help you out. How annoying.

Yep. Okay, if you type into Google search, GPS told couple to drive off, I'm sorry, Clive Avenue Bridge, I'm sorry, if you type in, if you search, GPS told couple to drive off Klein Avenue Bridge, you'll find a story about a couple in Chicago that drove around barriers for an under-construction highway, elevated on ramp that had been demolished and fell 37 feet. How will self-driving cars adapt to this? I thought of this story when I watched your YouTube radio program today. The answer is, as horrible as that sounds and as a possibility that could happen, it's a much less possibility than a human being would just drink too much and do the same thing, even stupider. So the computers and the protections and autonomous vehicles will be 10 times smarter than the average driver. And yes, they're not perfect, and you will have accidents.

but you'll have far fewer accidents and deaths than human beings will cause. All right. I think a computer would be smart enough to see a sign that says road closed. Probably, yeah. And not go down that road. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Good point.

That accident, that tragedy would be defined as human error. And that happens a lot more than computer error. Yes. Okay, hello, Earl and Stu. Thank you for the mystery shopping report of West Palm Beach, Nissan. I've been following your show for several months from Massachusetts. I've recently relocated South Florida. I've also been a

Nissan Maxima owner since 1989. And I love the car. I bought my second Maxima in 2003, and now I am ready to purchase my third. After looking over your good dealer, bad dealer list, I found there are five Nissan dealers in the area, but only two have made it to your good dealer list. Of those, the highest score is a D-plus

with H. Greg Nissan of Del Rey, which I do not consider an acceptable place grade for my purchase. Are there no Nissan dealers in South Florida that can provide me with a fair and honest price and treat me with respect? I will be happy to travel outside of the South Florida area to buy from a Nissan dealer that will at least provide a fair price for my next maxima. Therefore, I would like to see if it would be possible to task Agent Lightning with helping me find a Nissan dealer somewhere in the state of Florida that can earn at least a grade of C or better with your Mr. Shopping Reports. Thank you very much for your help and keep up the great work. work. I think this is a call for one of our vigilantes. It is tough, Nissan deals we talked

about it last week when we did the mystery shopping report for some reason. There seems to be a trend a little bit more aggressive behavior in advertising and the sales tactics. Well, yeah, the main reason is that Nissan is a company in distress and in disorganization. I believe there's C.E. E.O. went to jail. They have, they're desperate to try to stay above water. And when you have a desperate corporation, they take desperate measures, and they're pushing their dealers with, with no mercy, to sell more cars than they possibly can. And when you push a dealer and incentivize them in unfair manners, like stair-step incentives, and you punish dealers if they don't sell a number cars, the dealers get desperate. They do

terrible things. He does the same thing to his salespeople who will do that to you. Exactly. So, yeah, I hate to blanket and tire and make a car. The Nissan is not a bad car, quality wise. Not the best, but it's not bad.

But it's awfully hard to find a good Nissan dealer. Let's take that as a challenge. We'll try to find one. And what I would do is I would look for an auto nation, I would look for an auto group somewhere that owned a Nissan dealership because the public companies, and not all the time, but usually they're adhering to the letter of the law more than the average small individual dealership. And I would look, we'll look

around and we're going to try to find an honest Nissan dealer somewhere. Yeah. Is Delvery Nissan still on the good guys? I got to pull it up I'm not sure, but I know they just reminded me we don't have anybody with a grade better than a D plus. If you have any of folks out there that own Nissan's, if you have a dealer you dealt with

anywhere, let us know, particularly in Florida, that question had to do with Florida but if you've had a pleasant experience, honest, transparent experience with a Nissan dealer, let's hear from you and we'll mention the name on the air and then we'll, if we can, if it's within our

range will mystery shop that dealer. There is an auto nation Nissan dealership in Pembroke Prines, which is if you're new to the area, it's not that far from here, maybe an hour. Yeah, I try that. Yeah, that's a good suggestion because they're regulated a little bit more.

Okay, next one. Hello, Earl, I have a question for all of you. I want to buy a used car here for my son. He's here in Florida, I'm here in Florida, and I'm going to send my son to college in California. I want to ship it there in a car transport truck.

Do you know if your service department can rate the emissions as acceptable or another smaller emission service center that can issue a certification of passing emissions before I take the plunge and send a used car to California? I'm going to ask Rick the answer to that one. I don't think we have a question we asked before. We don't have emission testing that would tell us that. Yeah, we haven't had emissions testing here in South Florida in Florida and so long that no shop really keeps that equipment around anymore. But I believe a car has to be registered. I think

there's an official record when someone passes the California mission test, and you should be able to track that with a Venn member. Yeah, but I think they bought the vehicle here in Florida. Well, I mean, but you might, you could have a car in Florida. Well, you can because I know just for Toyota, when they, when they make these cars, they're 50 cent compliant, including California. So they, if you buy a Toyota in Florida, it's going to be, you could sell it to California without the emissions. One of you, one of you Googlers in the studio here, you should be able to Google that. I think you can, by VIN, find out if a vehicle is compliant, 50 state compliant. California.

Okay, I think we're going to go back to the funds, and we've got Tom from Jupiter. Good morning, Tom. Oh, hello? Hello? Hello? How are you this morning? I'm sorry. You're all scarred here. A couple of things. One of them is, jeez, lost my train of thought. Well, one of them is I was looking after I crashed my beloved Mazda Mini, Miata.

I was looking for another car, and so I was sort of looking around, and I thought about possibly an Audi convertible. So I went up to the dealership in Stewart, and with the Algae. dealership i don't remember which one was and so i'm talking with the sales lady there and we're chatting going through things and stuff and then her sales manager came out there and he starts going on about okay what do i need to do to get you in this car today and he's going on and on and that pushy sort of way and i said um anyway i just said you know well i'm certainly not going to decide today what i want to do well he walked away and went somewhere else and

I thought, girl, then I said, let me tell you something. That guy right there just cost you a sale. I said, I do not appreciate that aggressive going after me, that kind of way at all. You ain't going to sell me a car like that. But it ties in with what you were saying that the guy was saying about the maximum dealers with that Nissan, with the Nissan deals, you know, as far as doing anything they can to sell in the car, and they just get more aggressive. And they call me up, too, of course, following up my visit up there.

And I said, listen, your sales manager costs you to sell, period. That's all it was to it. And I said, I don't only appreciate how aggressive it was when he was chatting with me. But anyway, maybe it's just me. No, you're in the majority, Tom. That's all too common with car dealers, the high pressure. Okay, excuse me, I just remember the other thing. When you were talking about the emissions test,

we moved from Maryland about 10 years ago, and you guys may or may not know, but we had emissions test every one to two years for $12 a shot. Well, I thought it was the biggest bunch of crap in the world. The reason I did was because they did emissions tests, they didn't do any emission test on cars that were older in like five years or any trucks or anything which are the ones that need the emission test the only ones they did it on was cars that were newer than five years old

and most of them are probably going to pass and I just thought it was a total rip-off and a waste but they probably still doing it too but you guys used to do it in Florida but not anymore Yeah, it's been about 20 years. People hated it, and they complained so much, the politician said, okay, and they stopped them. Yeah, well, good. Yeah, because I just thought it was a joke

and just a way to get money easily, you know. Anyway, that's it. Okay, thanks, you guys do a great job. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Tom. Give us a call again. Remember, your anonymous Feedback.com,

and ladies, $50 for the first two new ladies. callers, and also don't forget about www.orgelante's dot com. I just, I googled that about the emissions, and if there's an emissions label on the door jam and also under the hood

and on the engine, and it will indicate whether it is emissions compliant in California. And I don't know if Jonathan has it up on the screen, I sent them the picture, and there's a picture where you can find that sticker. So it's pretty easy to find, but just Google it, and it's easy to do. All right, the next

anonymous feedback. Everything Earl told in his video on buy here, pay here dealers are the same tactics the new car dealerships use. Buy here, pay here lots are regulated. They abide by state warranty laws and you know the interest rate before you buy. The main difference is the cars they sell are cheaper and have higher miles and they're older. Well, I didn't know why I was that hard on buy here pay here. Matter of fact, interestingly enough, I have a. friend that we're looking to get a car through buy here pay here because we can't handle the

financing with our financial sources. I think buy here pay here they are subprime credit, people that can't buy a car through a conventional lender and they serve a real purpose. I mean, if you have to have a car, I'd rather, if I had to have a car and I couldn't get financed at a regular dealership, I would pay a high rate. of interest to have a car. I mean, you've got to have a car in certain parts of the world. Florida is one of them.

You have to go to work. You have to go to the pharmacy. You have to go to the doctor. Take your kids to school. What are you going to do with other car? So they serve a very important purpose. They had to charge a high interest rate because a lot of people don't make the payments and they have to repossess the car. Their cost of doing business is higher when you're dealing

with people with bad credit. So I never, what I worry about is the car dealer that treats you the way a subprime buy-hear payer dealer who charges your high rate of interest that doesn't have to charge it. But charge you on Ford, you can charge 30%, 25, 30%, and if you have to repossess 25% of your cars, you need that profit to keep in business. So they serve the purpose. Yeah, you've been criticized for going too easy on buy-here payer. Oh, too easy. No, no, no. I mean, this is a critique.

but I think we hear more things saying that people who don't like buy-hear-payer are things that you're going too easy because you made a very important point is for some people, that's the only avenue they have to get a car. And there are good buy-heer payer payer and there's bad buy-her pay here a lot. We've got check-cashing services. Everybody hates check-cashing services. Why should you charge somebody $5 to cash a $50 check?

I don't even know what they charge, but it's some obscene amount of money, obscene to you and to me, But to the person that can't cash a check anywhere, he doesn't have a, you know, he doesn't have a bank. And he goes into a 7-Eleven, and he says, well, you cash this for me, they laugh at him. So they go to a check cashing service, and they have to charge a lot of money because a lot of people are giving them bad checks. This is the options, you know, for the less fortunate. And like you said, they've got to have a car.

They've got to get to work, so many different things. But the most important thing is for you to do your homework as far as these buy here pay here because there are some good places that you can go. Beach cars. And not get your head torn off. Yeah. All right. More anonymous feedback.

Does traction control help prevent hydroplaining? I ask because this seemed to be something I used to worry about all the time. And I can't remember the last time my car hydroplained. All my cars in recent years have had traction. control so I'm wondering yes that's the one of the primary purposes of it yeah I can't remember the last time my hydroplanned I used to do it all the time mm-hmm I know saying these things you know about the past is to make her all you know sweat a little bit if you saw me my mom did the same thing we have we're gonna go back to the

phones and we believe that we have Geraldine calling from do we're good morning Geraldine morning are you Geraldine have you called us before oh welcome back how are you today very good very good what can we do for you questions this morning go ahead okay first of all I have a 20-20 carola how do I increase the fan speed when I I'm using the outside air setting only, not the AC or the heat, and can that be done? Yeah, just use the controls to raise the fan speed, but where the little button is it says AC, just turn, hit that so it turns the AC off, and it will run just the fan.

Okay, and I can make the fan run faster? Up to its maximum speed, yeah. Yeah, okay. All right. Okay. And how do I find my radio ID number? For XM? Yes.

I'm trying to get serious XM, but, and when I looked it up on the Internet, said I could access it by using my car radio ID, and I should go to the menu board. Car radio ID, I've never heard of that, Rick. What is a car radio ID? Right. Well, for Sirius XM satellite radio, you have to have the number from your radio for your account. And what you'll do is switch the mode to where it brings up Sirius or the XM radio on your radio itself.

And I believe Channel Zero will give you your radio ID number. No, it will. I've done that. Okay. How do I get the Sirius XM on my? car radio, though. Do I have to sync it up with a cell phone? Well, no, if your car, if the radio already has the adapter, there's an actual extra part with the, uh, that needs to be added in in order to have the, uh, do serious, unless some

radios already have it in and where you would switch from AM to FM to the CD player or whatever. You'll see it in that list. When you're switching it from the different channels from AM to FM, you'll see XM on there. Okay. And if it's not on there, then I need the extra part. Right. You'd need to see your dealership to have that set up. Okay. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome, Geraldine. And that's a great way to go to the dealership. They'll kind of walk you through that. Thanks for the phone call Geraldine. Give us a call again. 877

960-99-60, or you can text us at 772-49765-30. Now back to Stu. All right, we have anonymous feedback. That's a good one. This is for Earl. Why do you only care for dogs? Half the population prefers cats and would rather see you help them. Before you answer,

it's not true. I looked it up. Dog ownership versus cat ownership. 53% of Americans own dogs, but only 35% of Americans own cats. There's your answer. I'm kidding. I happen to love kitty cats. I like kitty cats. I like doggies. And I just happen to prefer dogs. I think dogs are more into my personality. I think... Well, we grew up with dogs and cats in our house. Yeah. I identify more with a dog and I do a cat. And by the way, Big Dog Ranch Rescue also,

also has a cat division. We have a subsidiary of kitty cats. They have a very nervous little contingency of cats on the campus. They are in the minority, and the kitty cats are nervous that are out there. Right. That's what they do, when they do the cat test for the dogs? All right, I just, I just. We love cats, and we love all animals, but big dog ranch rescue is such a force of nature here in South, or the whole state.

And it's an honor to work with them. And like you said, they do help cats, too. Okay, we're going to go back to the phones, and we have Kevin, and he's giving us a call from Buffalo, New York. Ooh, it must be chilly. Welcome, Kevin. Hey, good morning, everybody, but it's not chilly when I'm listening to Earl's Sourd on cars. It's great to hear your show.

Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you. Yeah, but, you know, sometimes my brother who lives in Sarasota up in Texas Maine, the temperature from Sarasota this past January, and it was the same temperature in Florida, and it was up here was 30 degrees for a while sometimes in Florida, so, but we're still warm, and I enjoy your show. It feels good. Several questions. One is, do I ever complain about a car dealer that I didn't really appreciate how they, what I bought the car from, the dealership, how I was treated?

Is it really worth the effort? Does the manufacturer like to hear that or do I just let it go? That's a great question. Well, you can tell the manufacturer, but to be honest with you, Kevin, they don't do much. I mean, they pass it back to the dealer. Customer satisfaction is, they talk customer satisfaction, but they don't walk the talk. And manufacturers, the reason being that the highest volume, car dealers of just about every make are the ones that are probably the roughest on their

customers. And high-pressure sales tactics sells cars, high-pressure advertising, unfair and deceptive advertising, unfair and deceptive sales practices. If you have a dealer that's selling a thousand cars a month, and there are dealers that do that, they're going to be a high-pressure outfit. And the manufacturers, it's all about the money. General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Honda, they all, it's the bottom line. They have a fiduciary responsibility to deliver to the stockholders. They're public companies. And the law says that you have to do everything possible, honestly, to make as much money as you can for the stockholders. And unfortunately, some of these pressure tactics and things that are so offensive to you and me,

are working in the marketplace to sell more cars and make more money. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't, you could notify the manufacturer, but you're better off to try to handle it yourself or go through the local regulators like the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Attorney General's Office, County Office of Consumer Affairs, even the Better Business Bureau, as weak as they are, but you get more action there than you do when you go to the manufacturer. Yeah, because, you know, I even spoke to the owner of the dealer,

and I was a repeat customer. And when he tells me a line that I don't make a lot of money on the cars, well, then, you know, that isn't what I want to hear. I want to hear that's a good private and nice service to me. Sure. All right. My other three questions are relating to a car. Three things I would want to know if it would void the new car warranty.

If I install the trailer hitch, the wiring for pulling a small trailer, and since we're in Buffalo, New York, and we do use salt on the road, Will rust-proofing void the warranty? You should ask the question. Yeah. I mean, there are specifications for the model car you have that will tell you what weight trailer you can pull, and you don't want to do more than that

because you would void the warrant in. You also could screw up your transmission. Yeah. Yeah, I was more interested in, obviously, if you put a trailer hitch on, and also if you have to attach the wiring for the trailer harness and you have to cut into the wiring system because I do not believe most cars

have a bunch of wires in the back of the car where you can add a trailer. It's like I had a car one van that had it like that and that's what I was worried about. Yeah, I would definitely consult the, is it Ford? It's a GM product. A GM. The dealership for sure does make sure anything that's installed is by specs

because anything that screws up, you know, anything existing could be caused for, you know, where it could impact your warranty. Rick, you got a point. I would recommend for the wiring, look for a type of system that doesn't actually tap in on the wires, on the factory wire by like cutting into it, but they make ones where you actually unplug the tail light connector and plug a pigtail in between the factory harness and the tailite itself, and that's how it connects in. Those are a much better solution, because if you need to remove it, it can be easily removed, and the factory harness is pristine. You don't damage it

at all. All right. All right. That's a great idea. That's why I like listening to an intelligent conversation from your show. It's great. What about rustproof? I know you guys have experience with restproof people. Would that avoid the worth, even though the rustproof manufacturer says it doesn't? we don't know much about that I can't see how it would I mean you're there's simply spraying a coating on the underside of the car so I couldn't see how

that would void any sort of warranties alright but your last second last answer we don't have much experience with it I like the honesty of the show like that you didn't try to sell me anything out of it well we used to have experience but it was a kind of a worthless thing that was put on the cars down there

was polygly coat and all that sort of stuff rust and dust it was kind of a scam but up in Buffalo, I imagine, you probably have actually a legitimate need with all the salt on the rose. That's correct. Yeah. All right, gentlemen.

We really appreciate, and ladies, I appreciate all your effort. Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. Stay warm. Give us a call again. We have. Well, folks, I think shortly we're going to get ready

for the mystery shopping report, and the mystery shopping report is from Bev Smith, Toyota. But I think this, too, has a few more on a whole lot of your anonymous feedback. And we go to YouTube too. Yeah. Oh, you too, too, and Texas. So who do you want to go to YouTube?

Just step over to Rick. Well, these are just a couple quick notes here. Tom Steckle says he bought and read your book, Earl, and he says, great information that every car buyer should have. Thank you. And then for our... Can I do a quick commercial? Yeah.

Available on Amazon. Confessions is a recovering car dealer. 100% of the proceeds. go to Big Dog Ranch Rescue. And we also take care of kitty cats out there at Big Dog Ranch Rescue. And we also take care of little dogs too. I've always worried about the name, Big Dog. It's really a big and little dog.

And you buy it on Amazon, you learn how to buy a car with it. I've been ripped off by a car dealer, and you save a dog's life because 100%. You know, I don't like these people that say, a portion of this goes. You know, sometimes they give 25 cents for a $1,000 product, and they say a portion of it. The portion of this book is 100% of what the money...

After Amazon gets there. Yeah, after Amazon gets there. But all the money we get from Amazon, we give it 100% to Big Dog Grand Rescue. No shaganogens here. Matter of fact, we have the way it's set up. Every time somebody buys a book, a deposit's made into Earl's Short Charities, and that's transferred automatically over to Big Dog Ranch. rescue so we don't a penny doesn't even go into your pocket that's right so folks

pick up the book you can buy it on amazon and i think that big dog ranch uh small dogs kitty cats i think the big comes from the big heart that they have and all the work that they have done and you can you can adopt anything out there big and small we save them all yeah that's what they say orangutan can we got do we have any orangutans i want on orangutan okay well We'll do what we can, sir. We'll get you in an orangutan. Those are endangered species. You will not be getting in orangutan.

All right. Anonymous feedback. I'm sorry, go ahead, Rick. Well, actually, we have two suggestions for our fellow that was looking for a Nissan. Michael Vittatamo says, Crown Nissan in St. Petersburg is very good. And Ernesto Ortega says he's heard good things about Gainesville Nissan in Gainesville. Yep.

He texted me about that. We're going to get to that. He's also volunteered. Ernesto is a vigilante as well and he's volunteered to mystery shop the Nissan dealership in Gainesville so I'll communicate with him yeah after the show

all right anonymous feedback either the standard parking stop height needs to be lowered or the standard height for front bumpers on cars must be raised I've only torn off one of one trim piece backing out of a spot but let me tell you I scrape it every

damn day yeah that's really stupid that happens I mean my car doesn't do that I love our listeners, by the way. Well, that's true. I mean, it's just, why? I don't know.

Ours have gotten so much lower to the ground for aerodynamics that a lot of cars, I have a hard time getting the lift underneath the car. We actually have to have guys that will help us pull up on the car to get the lift legs to go under. It's gotten crazy. That is. I think we're ready to jump over to our mystery shopping report. There's some left, but we'll get to them next week.

Okay. Okay, well, maybe we wind it up as soon as we normally did. I don't know. Anyway, I got the wrong, here we are. Mr. Shop of Beth Smith Toyota. Here we go. In April last year, we investigated Best Smith Toyota for running a very distasteful ad

during the early phases of the COVID pandemic. Beth Smith's Toyah's online ad for 0% APR for 84 months was headlined, Best Smith Toyota stimulus. We want to help. Now this is back in what? March. This is in April. April, March, April. COVID, it just became apparent how bad it was

and people started to get scared. So here we go. Exploiting the fear of the potential customers for business to view them. It went on to proclaim, just announced, this is the advertisement. Zero percent APR financing for 84 months. Get a check for up to $5,000 back when you buy.

Make no payments for, six months when you buy our lease. You get a $25 Walmart or Lowe's gift card with any test drive, even at home test drives. And if you just tuned in, this is not the ad that we mystery shop. This was back in April of 2020 at the onset of the COVID pandemic. And so that's the reason we're going back to see if they've cleaned up their act. Below the ad, there was a thick block of the smallest, most illegible mind-numbing fine print of a ever seen. The text was in all caps white over a dark red background.

It was very clever to do that. There's I guess studies, optical studies. I had a seizure when I was trying to read it. Yeah, you can't read it. And here's what it really said. The fine print. And it took a while to get this where we could read it. Offers on select models with a proof that means

you know, one car maybe. Here's the example. New 2019 Toyota Sequoia. VIN number, MSRP, 5885, cashback, in lieu of all incentives and rebates, so they're really just taking the incentive and rebates, and what you're entitled to anyway, but now they're taking them away. For retail new Toyota contracts, first three months deferred through Southeast Toyota Finance, next three months paid by Bill Smith, up to $1,500 that cap it,

interest accrues, of course, during the deferrals. For release, a new Toyota contract, six months covered by Bill Smith, up to $1,500, up to $1,500, a $3,000 gift cards provided by best material for new and used car test drives, one per household. Prior test drives included finance offer available through space. This is a really, really almost nauseous part. Finance offer available only through Space Coast Credit Union up around Merritt Island, I guess, for first responders and medical field employees only. All offers exclude tax tax tax title registration, $898.50. Dealer fee, these charges represent cost, and here's the disclosure. I won't read that.

And you couldn't read this, but that's the disclosure. If you have perfect vision on a microscope or a magnifying glass, you'll be able to spot the catch. Actually, there are several catches. The big one has to do with the offer of 0% for 84 months to get that. And this is a really, really nasty thing. thing. To get that, you have to get a membership into Space Coast Credit Union. You've got to be a member. I mean, how many members do they have? And be a first responder. You've got to be a fireman or a cop or you've got to be employed in a medical field. So that was the really onerous, disgusting part about that advertising. I think it's great that there were special offers for the brave women and men who were fought, who fought against our fighting against COVID-19. But this ad wasn't meant for those folks. They knew about it because the credit union would have told them.

This ad is meant to fool everyone because that was in the fine print. You assume that you can get this offer, and you can't, unless you're a first responder and a member of the credit union. That's the reason we really blasted them a year ago. Give him another chance. We need to go back. Have they cleaned up their act? So I take my hat off.

When Agent Thunder went to the dealership, he encountered the expected bait-and-switch and left with a price that was $14,000 over MSRP on the new Toyota. It came in for a sweet deal, but he wasn't a first responder. He ended up paying $1,400 over sticker. Nine months later, we returned to Best Smith Toyota

with a different agent than a new strategy. Agent Lightning was asked to begin her mission, our female shopper, Mr. Shopper, with an internet inquiry for a price on a new 2021 Toyota Highlander and ended up with a visit to the dealership. The big question, would an internet price be the same as the in-store price? Okay, here's a report. I'm Agent Lightning. I'm going to speak of the first person. I started this mission by finding Best Smith Toilers website, Navigate. to the new vehicle inventory.

I select the 2021 Highlander XLE with an MSRP of 42,00109. To get a price, I had to fill out a form with my name, email address, and phone number, I clicked, get E Price, and waited. Now, for you amateur mystery shoppers out there, when you want to shop a dealership or you want to find out a price on dealership, you can get a free email address,

you get it from Microsoft Outlook, you get it from Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook, you get from Yahoo, a number of free email addresses. So don't use your own email address because you get hounded. And you can also make up a name, of course, and you should. And a phone number, you can put on a phony phone number, and oftentimes you can get away with no phone number. But don't, if you're going to play amateur shopper, don't do this because if you put your real information in,

you'll never hear at the end of it. The reason I know this is I do some mystery shopping myself, And I have an AOL email address that I never use, and I use it strictly for mystery shopping. And when I go in mystery shop, I mystery shop the car dealership about six or eight months ago, and they're still hounded me. I mean, they keep on going after you until you buy or you die. That's another expression, cardiolish, you know, you tell the salespeople, you follow up until they buy or they die. Where am I? Okay, filled out the form.

Within a few minutes. Thank you. Within a few minutes, I began to receive emails from Best Myth to Rio. I mean, it's fast, and, you know, car dealers make an inquiry, email, text, phone, bam, they're on you. And they never stop. The email indicated I'd be receiving a $3,500 discount to get an e-price, electronic, online price, $38,609. dollars. Now, what does that mean? You don't know what it means. It's an e-price. They call it a cash price. They call it an out-the-door price. The out-the-door price is never the out-the-door price. I'll tell you what the definition of a real out-the-door price is later. There was no out-the-door price included or any listing of the fees that would be added to the e-price. Included the email was a Toyota Vehicle information sheet in a note from the end. internet manager Brian. While obtaining a great price is important, nothing takes the place

of seeing a vehicle in person. I'd love to invite you to the dealership. This is Brian talking. I would love to invite you the dealership at your earliest convenience for a professional vehicle presentation. Now, they want to get you on the door. The chances of you're getting a real price online, one in a hundred, one in five hundred, every now and then. Right. It doesn't pan out. They don't do that. They will not give you the price. I didn't respond to Brian. I planned to just pop in later in the day, so I'm Agent Lightning.

I arrived earlier in the afternoon, enter the showroom. It might have been in the morning, because Stu told me he lies about this. I'd switch things around. Matt greeted me at the door and asked if I was there to see anyone specific. He also, after apparently seeing him with a car I arrived in, asked if I was trading in my Honda. I answered no to both questions. told him when I was looking for, I didn't mention the price quote,

I'd already received from the dealership. Matt led me to his desk, and we sat down. All the time, there's no communication between the Internet Department and what we call them, the four salesmen and the regular salespeople. I will say this, though. If you put an Internet request in, it goes into their system, their customer management system. In most cases, I mean, yeah.

Right, and so if you go to the dealership later, the salesperson, they'll see that, but they all, they're deceitful amongst each other. They will steal deals for me So it's called skating And that's very common Exactly Everybody's on commission And why should George get to commission

I'm Charlie I'm going to get the commission For myself George It's doggy dog Amongst the salespeople oftentimes And of course it's always

Doggy Dog with the customer Asked me a series of questions The usual stuff I wrote my answers on a photocopied forum I noticed the young man lurking Nearby who seemed to be trying to listen in he noticed me. Step forward and apologized. He said he was a new salesperson in training. Matt said he'd be shadowing. I said there's nothing wrong with that. That's the way to learn. We found a 2021 Highlander on Matt's computer. It wasn't the exact one that I was quoted, but it was close enough. MSRP 41-269, that's about $1,000 or less. So you need to factor that in if you're MSRP is a very important thing. When you're shopping cars,

in the same year, making a mile if you always want to shop the same MSRP. And one of the switching cars is one of the most onerous tricks of car dealers. You come in on one car, they don't want you to stick with that car that you know the MSRP of. They want to get you to another car

because then they can change the price and you can't catch it as easily. Matt and the trainee left to get a key for the Highlander. They were back quickly, led me outside. where we found the vehicle, Matt gave me and the trainee a lengthy presentation of the features and then backed it out, and back it out the spot. Out of the spot, sorry.

Out of the spot, right. It was a denim sticker, a fixed to the window near the Mononi label. Now hang on you, this is a good one. Additional $4,990, $5,000, let's call it, additional over sticker. $4,990 over MSRP. There was $2,995 for additional equipment plus a $1,995 market value adjustment. Market value adjustment is just an insult to your intelligence.

And so the $2,995, an overpriced, an overpriced, ridiculous, extra equipment is bad enough. But the market value adjustment is an insult to your intelligence. The additional equipment included nitro-tirefuel, classic BS. Zoom reports, nitrogen tires is worth nothing. Google it, trust me. Floramats, overpriced floor mats, overpriced window tent, overpriced wind of tent,

alloy wheel locks, overpriced, and lifetime power train warranty, which they advertise every day is being free. Now they're putting it into the extra addendum label and charging you for. They're building value. You know, all that stuff is worth under $200. Exactly.

They're all worth... The power train warranty is worth zero, and the nitro is worth zero. Window tents about 130 floor mats, maybe a little over $200, maybe $80, $90 for the floor mats. And wheel locks, what, $30, $20? $25 all day long.

The trainee stayed behind while Matt and I took a short test drive up, up and down U.S. 1. We returned to his desk, look at the deal. The trainee was waiting for us. Before Matt left to get his numbers from his manager, he told me that I would give four years of free maintenance instead of two, usually offered by Toyota. And Toyota gives two years of free maintenance. A lot of the manufacturers do the free maintenance, because maintenance is very little cost today. I mean, you're doing rotate and balance and oil changes, and it's very, very inexpensive. Good news about all new cars. So the manufacturer say, what the hell is to give it to them, and they do. The implication was that this four years, the extra two, was exclusive to Ben Smith Toyota, and it isn't.

It comes with Toyagard. You're paying for that extra two years. They're charging you $699 for a bunch of rust and dust and fabric coat and roadside service. So normally I would say, well, they don't charge the full $699 because you're not buying MSRP, but hold on, bear with us. You're paying for it. Yeah, you're paying for it. Matt and the trainee left to visit the sales manager,

they returned with a worksheet. Worksheet, top line was the inflated phony Monroney, $46,619, $3,000. I'm sorry, $5,000. That's a misprint. $5,000. $5,000. He took off $3,500 labeled preferred customer program.

I like that. To give me a selling price of $43,000. 19, then he added $800 for a pre-delivery service fee, that's a hidden fee, sales tax, $601 for license and title fee. As he went over the daily, he made random marks, underlying numbers, and drawing arrows on the worksheet, and they didn't seem to do anything. He would just do this, he'd draw an arrow to here in line, but he was talking. Maybe it was just a nervous thing, that's right.

Yeah. Well, the identical items in dealer fee was charging me $2,700. $240 over MSRP. After the discount. After the discount. So here you are at a slam dunk, $2,740 over sticker price, and that's a discounted price. That's bigger than a slam dunk. Now this is old, old school.

Out the door was, say, 47,317. Man asked me what I thought. I said, I thought I was getting a better deal. He asked me to tell me what I had in mine. He said, I thought I was getting a better deal. You know, you say, what do you have? What do you think is a better deal? And he'd see what he could do.

I told him, it had been ages since I negotiated by a car, said I really had no idea. You want to know if I was signed in a day if I approved to the numbers. I'm sorry. It's my computer keyboard. The numbers he came back with. Yeah. You were up late last night.

No, no, no. I have a malfunctioning keyboard. I said. I told him I didn't know and my brother wanted to do some research online with me. I said I may research the prices tonight unless he blew my socks off with a great deal.

Matt said he could do that. Now you put the fear of God into the dealer and just a little bit of negotiation. Remember, he thought he had a laydown. He thought he had a sucker and he's trying to make $2,740 over sticker. And guess what?

They do make that awesome people. And if you're the victim that comes in there, the first-time buyer, you never bought a car before, English is not your first language, maybe you don't have the best education, maybe you're timid, maybe you're easily intimidated, any of those categories, you'll pay a $10,000 profit to a car dealer if he can get away with it. And here, Agent Lightning just said, I got to go home and talk about it with my brother, do a little research online. He's going back to the manager and I'll say, Now, she's not a lay-down boss.

She's going to go home, talking over with her brother, and she's going to go online, she going to get some more prices. That's all it took. They came back with a new worksheet with a bigger discount. This time, the preferred customer discount was $7,000. Did you hear what I said? $7,8,8, and my selling price was $38. Of course, they had the $898 dealer feedback, and so now the real price was $39,6.9.

The out-the-door price was $42,7.30. They came down to what? $5,000. So just whispering in their ear about talking to your advisor at home, your brother, talking about going online, checking other prices. When you walk out that door in the old school, you don't have to do too much to get them to come down in price. That is the way it goes.

So, and that's where it is in most dealerships, to be honest with you. I told him it looked much better. Matt said if I was ready to sign in, but I said no. I told him I think I needed to take my brother up on his offer to help me do so. Matt told me I would have to be pretty lucky to find the price as aggressive as the one he gave me. I didn't mention I'd already received a lower quote from his own dealership in an email this morning.

I told Matt I would take my chances and that I may be back, he gave me his card left. Now, I question this statement to, do you really think he would have gotten that price? No. No, no, no. I'm just saying, but yeah. If they would have done the same thing to the online price. They'd start you over at the beginning probably. That's what we see a lot. You might have gotten the price you think you've made a progress. Then they start you at sticker and they beat you up again. And this is a great example of two-tier pricing. And two-tier pricing is S-O-P. My dealership did two-tier pricing for a long time.

And we had an Internet Department, and we had a four-sales department, and now, in most dealerships, they've kind of merged. And online buying is really what it's all about now. And a lot of dealerships, it still hasn't. But it was really strange for a long while. So if you went online in my dealership, going back, how many years ago was this? 20?

Went online first. Yeah. Yeah. We give you a much better price online than if you came in the front door and talked to a salesperson. It just seems stupid now. And the best reason I call myself a recovering card dealer. I'm not recovered yet, but I'm getting closer every day. Okay.

Where are we? Business Addendum is one of the biggest we've seen. almost $5,000. The price on Agent Lightning was okay, not great, with a little effort, getting some more quotes online, Asian Lightning wouldn't have no problem, getting a better deal. So even the price they walked them on,

it's not a great, not a good price. Yeah, I didn't want to comment too much on pricing of a Highlander, lest it appear that we were advertising Highlanders. Exactly. Exactly. And the grades are flowing in. I think this one hit an emotional chord with our listeners. so Linda usually gives them a big fat F

this time she's going for volume she's giving them what appears to be five smaller Fs so it's still an F Doug and Ollie I'm sorry Ollie gives him an F and Doug gives an F and then some text come here

Jonathan Welton gives him an F Bob gives him an F and I don't know what to say I'm going to I don't know what to say D. Yeah, we're...

I've seen worse. We have the grades are more important now because we are using... We're not passing, that's right. It says, I'm giving them in D. Yeah, it's not a pass or fail. Rick, where do you go? We've got RICO with F, find another dealer.

F for finding another dealer. Negan 1, D plus, but you had to work for that low price. Wade, bite, with a huge F. Karen coming in with an F. And let's see here, Tom Gilliland, no fine print here, F, Andrew Plissonsky with a C, Mark Ryan with an F, Ernesto, with a D. Myself, I'm going to go with a D minus, because I think, if you go in there ready to fight and armed up with the knowledge that you've got on, I think you can do something to them, but. Yeah, you could. I really believe you could go in there and hammered them hard. you could come out. Any car dealer, almost any car dealer, if you go in there and hammer,

and that's a lot better way to do it than that, true car, Costco, but if you're going to go in there and hammer and negotiate and you're any good, you can get a really good price. And you saw what Agent Lightning did with just a kind of a suggestion that she'd be shopping and compared to Nancy. Well, I'll tell you, I hate going into a car dealership and then having to go home and take a shower. but in this case I think I would have to take two showers so for that I give them just a simple oh well we're gonna you know we're not gonna we're not gonna fail them we're gonna have to go with a day still not a very good GPA it's not gonna look good on the report card but it is

what it is I think we're about all the time aren't we okay folks listen thank you very much for tuning in Dural steward armed cars we were happy to join you a join you this morning and stay tuned next week we'll be right back here on saturday morning have a great weekend and stay safe Let go. Let's go. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Two. Let's come.