Earl Stewart on Cars - 04.24.2021 - Your Calls, Texts, and Mystery Shop of Palm Beach Mitsubishi

Episode Date: April 24, 2021

Earl and his team answer various caller questions and responds to incoming text messages. Earl’s female mystery shopper, Agent Lightning visits the new Palm Beach Mitsubishi in West Palm Beach to see if she can get the $4000 promo price on a 2020 Mitsubishi Outlander SUV. 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.

Well, your auto keep yourself safe team is here assembled in the studios in North Palm Beach. We're looking forward to a show. I hope you're looking forward to the show as much as we are. And this is our second decade, I believe, in doing radio shows for consumers to protect you and have a little fun at the same time. We aim to educate, entertain. We'd like to amuse you occasionally.

You can amuse us, entertain us, and educate us, too. It's a free-flow live radio, very exciting event. two hours every Saturday morning, tell everybody about it, because where else can you go and call and get information on the mechanics and repairs? We've got Rick Kearney in the studio here, one of the best computer auto scientists around. You can call them anything from a grease monkey to a technician to a mechanic. I prefer computer auto scientists. This is the 21st century.

And if you're not on top of your learning curve with automotive today, you're going to be left in the dust. Cars are very complicated. Sometimes they're too complicated, even for the people at the end where they repair them, you have to actually talk to technicians that are experts at the factory. It's becoming complex. Computers. They're computers on wheels. So if you have any questions about your car, mechanically, electronically, artificial, intelligently, Bluetooth, all that stuff out there, internet, sort of a vehicle you're driving.

Call us at 877-9-60-99-60. 877-960-99-60. We tend to give priority to the sales end, and that's not the right way to go about it. I guess maybe the sales end can be more entertaining.

Our mystery shopping report is probably one of the most entertainment entertaining things on radio. I mean, I don't want to be am honest about it, but I think it's really, really fun. We mystery shop a different car dealership somewhere in Florida,

sometimes out of the state of Florida, Tennessee a couple times, recently, and we pretend to buy or lease a car. We'll take an ad, a too good to be true ad. They're all too good to be true. I say this, not tongue and cheek, but

looking in the eye dead serious don't believe any car dealer advertising you see don't believe any auto manufacturer advertising you see I dare anyone to show me an advertisement

from auto manufacturer or a car dealer advertising the price or payment on a car that is totally legitimate, totally transparent ain't going to happen. all Chevrolet Camaros with the same equipment

all Chevrolet Corvettes with the same equipment cost the dealer exactly the same the MSRP is exactly the same the amount of discount that a dealer can afford to give is exactly the same so if you're shopping for a Chevrolet Corvette or a Ford Bronco you are going to get

lower prices advertised and quoted to you then they can possibly deliver on. Why? Because if they put the legitimate price in there, you could take that price and go to their competition, which is only a few blocks away. Car dealers have too much competition on each market, and that was the fault of the manufacturers. You go into any metro area,

you'll find four, five, six, several A dealers, four dealers, Toyota dealers, Honda dealers, and they're within a few minutes' drive of each other. so it would be suicide for a car dealer to put his real price in his advertisement so they lie to you that's really the reason the show is on the air from the sales perspective and I just covered the service repair and maintenance perspective so

love to hear from you 877 960 9960 Texas at 772 4976530 We have a unique line that you can contact us anonymously, and as you might expect, at the URL, the website, is your anonymous Feedback.com. Y-O-U-R-A-N-O-N-Y-M-O-S feedback.com. Your Anonymous Feedback.com. It's become probably our most popular means of receiving queries and comments and whatever.

You'd think we'd get a lot of harsh, candid, profane, or even vulgar comments, but we don't. I guess that speaks to our audience. We have, we're only preaching the choir. A lot of our listeners, unfortunately, not unfortunately, but I would like to have people that need it more, but a lot of our listeners

are very intelligent, very sophisticated. We need more just normal people that need help. So spread the word for us, please. And lastly, we have a new thing that we put in called Earl's Vigilantees. I'm wearing my Vigilante hat, and there's a little decal there. When you join up, we send you a hat free, and we're looking for representatives in all parts of the world. Let's start with the U.S., and you will be there as a vigilante.

We'll have you on our website, Earl and Cars.com, and we'll have your availability, your contact information. for people that get victimized, people that need help. You might be in Missouri, you might be in Florida, you might be in Hawaii, you might need problem. We need vigilantes in all 50 states. Let's start there. And that is Earlsandvigilandies.com. Earlsvigilandies.com.

Well, let me introduce my co-host, Nancy Stewart. Read with me, says the beginning of the show, over just a half an hour, a little radio station called Sea View, same physical location, different station, different odors. Now we're two hours, and we're on Saturdays. But we've been on for, this is 20 years about, we've been on the air, and Nancy, she's also my wife, co-founded the show with me.

And she is a female advocate. She talks to the ladies directly. She has a special offer she'll tell you about. If you're a first-time caller and you call her and you call this show, we have a really nice surprise for you, positive sort of a gift she'll tell you about. And she wants to hear the ladies' opinion. So Nancy, it's all yours. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to another exciting show here at Earl Stewart on Cars. I want to thank the ladies this morning for helping me and supporting me with this platform that we have been running for quite a long time.

We recognize the fact that your, you know, your contribution is pretty significant when you go to purchase or lease, service, anything at all. So therefore, we'd like to extend $50 for the first two new lady callers. It's a win-win situation. Give us a call. If you don't have a question, you can, you know, share your opinion with us. So give us a call, toll free at 877-960-99-60. That's 877-9-60-99-60. And you can also text us this morning at 772-497-6-5-30.

Well, back to the recovering card dealer. Sue Stewart, got in to hear the nick of time this morning. It's always exciting coming to a live radio station. I remember one time I had a flat tire that was real exciting and sometimes you have traffic problems and bridges go up Rick made it

I mean Rick, I mean Stu made it in the nick of time That's right And he got here It's 759 No thanks to my daughter Maggie Who parked behind me And if you're listening

Don't worry I made it in time Okay I used actually I used a cool bit of Vehicle technology to know exactly when I was going to arrive I was using Apple Maps on Apple CarPlay, and it had my ETA as 758, so I texted Earl that, and I pulled in at exactly 758. Pretty cool, huh?

I knew you did that. Yeah, I didn't guess that. I love Google. Anyway, this week, our mystery shopping report I'm pretty excited about, just because it's a dealership that we've never heard of. It, like, sprung up overnight right underneath our noses. We didn't know it was there. So I was really, it's a Mitsubishi dealership. We mystery shop Palm Beach Mitsubishi.

on the corner of, gosh, I can't remember where it is, down there in... Australian and... Yeah, Australian and down there somewhere. Yeah. It's in West Palm Beach. Yeah. And I thought all the Mitsubishi dealerships were going away. We had one right around the corner from the Toyota dealership.

Belvedere in Australia. Belvedere and Australian. And it was built to a brand new point, and I thought that was kind of cool. But then again, I'm a car guy, and I think weird things are cool. But it's a good mystery shopping for it. I'll tell you something about that. The owner that you identified, Christian Berrien, he was Trent Brown, our company Boat C-Captain's last boss.

Oh, okay. I hired Trent, and he was working for Chris Berrien. Yeah, I looked him up and just trying to see what other dealerships he owned. He owns a Coral Cadillac, and I don't think there's any other dealerships, but his name's associated with some real estate things and some other stuff. That's the only one, yeah. Yeah, well, it's always good to learn something new, and we will educate our listeners about what to look out for.

Okay, how about text on YouTube? Are we editing this early? Every week, we have some waiting for us. We can kick it off with Anne-Marie's text because it was sitting there as I got here at 758 a.m. Amory says, good morning. News outlets report that car rental firms sold off a lot of their inventory last year

and rental cars are in short supply this year. This prompts the question. Do you know where the major car rental companies get their cars? do they get them straight from the automakers or do they get them through dealers? Just wondering, thanks, have a great day. That's a great question. Stu has an interesting anecdote

about a group of dealers that we belong to that are upset at Toyota about where rental cars get their cars from. Fleet sales. I mean, every manufacturer does a ton of business in what they call it in fleet sales and they sell them in bulk to rental car companies, corporations

that have maintained fleets of vehicles, and they usually buy them below the cost that dealers get them for to sell to normal retail customers. And so that's part of it. But they also do get them from dealers as well. And they try to buy them at below cost. We were recently approached with a deal that we were not interested in taking

just because inventories are so low. It wouldn't make sense for us to sell cars and lose money at this point in the game. Anne-Marie, directly addressing your question rental cars are furnished by what the dealers call fleet sales. Fleet sales are directly from the manufacturer to the Hertz, Avis, National Budget, all the different rental companies. And they're discounted way below what you as a retail buyer can buy the car for.

So they really hurt the market for the car dealer who's trying to retail cars. Now, car dealers also can get involved in fleet sales, but they have to go through a special department because the manufacturers, as I say, will lower the price of the car if, and you can kind of understand this. If Hertz is going to buy 5,000 cars, they deserve a lower price. But the problem is these cars are dumped on the market after Hertz gets through with them. And Hertz and Davis and a lot of these dealers have learned to retail those cars themselves. So they set up a competition between the dealer and the rental companies. Dealers don't like fleet sales. The manufacturers that heavily resort to fleet sales

are typically the ones that have excess manufacturing availability, I mean capacity. And that's not a good thing. They don't like to have excess. It's a raised fixed cost, a plant sitting there idle. So they can crank these plants up, and they can sell the cars, even if they break even to budget rent a car, and that keeps the plant going.

They don't have to close it down. Makes your stockholders happy, too. When a manufacturer sells a car to a fleet at $1,000 less than he sells it to a dealer, he's still making money. Manufacturers make far more money when they sell a car to a dealer or a fleet than the dealer makes when he sells a car to you. Now, that's not 100% true, because if you don't do your homework, and listen to Earl on cars, you can pay a car dealer, a huge profit,

which is even more than he would make when he sold the car to Avis. So if you do your homework, you can buy a car and a profit to the dealer much less than the manufacturer makes when he sold the car to the dealer. And also, that's the reason they sell cars to fleet so cheap. Great information, Earl. If you just tuned in, you're listening to Earl Stewart on Cars here, and I want to take a moment and thank all of you for tuning in every Saturday morning. You are certainly an important part of the show, and we are going to start the morning off with the first caller,

and that's a first-time caller, female, and her name is Donna. Good morning, Donna. Good morning. And welcome. Thank you. Thank you for helping me build my platform. If you stay on the line, you can give the control room your information, and I'll get a $50 checkout to you. What can we do for you this morning?

Well, first of all, thank you for that offer, but it's not the first time you saved me money. I've been leasing cars now for, oh, this is my fourth car, and I saved money on leasing this one by listening to your show and Earl with all the fees. that are optional, that they make seem, aren't optional. But I'm at the tail end of this lease. I turn the car in this afternoon, as a matter of fact, and I'm flying out of the country tomorrow. So my question is, with the return fee, which I've never had to pay before because I rolled into another lease vehicle,

am I stuck for that? And I've passed the inspection, so there's nothing there to go. go on. But it's mostly any return fees they might try to lay on me when I return the car and don't roll over into another lease. Don, I'm afraid so. That's one of the dirty little secrets about leasing. They have a penalty. They call it a lease return fee, but basically it's a penalty if you don't release from the same manufacturer or buy another car. The only way you can get out of that is to buy another car. That's another reason the manufacturers and the dealers would always prefer to lease you a car.

They make much more profit when they lease you a car than when you buy a car. So you can still negotiate a good lease and you can still get a good payment on a lease, but you are going to hit... They have an inception fee and a return fee. They get you going and coming, and they also have an administration fee,

which is kind of like in the middle, and then they're going to hit you for above-average normal wear and tear, and you have to be very careful when you turn your car on because they can really if you don't or if you aren't careful and do the inspection with them and find out what they are flagging you for above average normal wear and tear you can get a bill for a thousand or $2,000

that's not uncommon you know Donna this is Donna this is Nancy and Earl's right about that boy I'll tell you what when you turn your car in pictures are worth a thousand words So you really, if you don't want to be hit with any, well, last minute fees or whatever you want to call them, they got names for them. So take pictures of your car.

It's really important. Pictures are worth $1,000. Pictures are worth $1,000. And more. Seriously, thousands of dollars. Yeah. So a little pun on words there. $1,000 or more.

Goodness. Well, I have passed the dealer inspection. And the inspector came out last week and cleared me. I have one scratch, but it was under the limit. But at this point, it's more about the turn-in fees, like you said, that we could get slapped with. Well, that's unfortunate, and I'm glad you're called because a lot of people aren't aware of that. And it's a luxury. If you buy, or Lisa Honda, if you lease a Honda, and you change your mind and you want to buy a Chevrolet,

you have to pay a penalty for leaving Honda and that's not right and it's not disclosed up front I promise you that the salesperson that leased you the car didn't tell you about it but it's in the fine print

and who reads a lease contract nobody and that's how they get you the way all the retailers especially the car deals get away with what they do is they put anything they want in the fine print because nobody sees it and you don't see it until after the transaction is completed, and it's too late.

You've already signed a paperwork. Right, that's right. And is there such a thing as a deposit from, when we rented the very first car, which was now four cars ago, we put down a deposit or an upfront fee sort of to pay in and lower down the monthly payment. Is there anything I can claim back on that?

Well, if you, the deposit doesn't lower your monthly payment, Well, I think they might be confusing that the dealer makes it confusing. The down payment would. There's a separate security deposit that's very rarely required in leases these days. Did you give a security deposit? I don't think so. I think it was what you're saying now is a down payment. You can check the contract.

If you have the paperwork, it'll list if there was a security deposit. They were common a long time ago, but in the last maybe 10, 15 years, I haven't seen many leasing companies require it. Okay. All right. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your help. I learn something from you every week and really enjoy listening and wish all the best and Nancy for her show because we women do get duped quite a lot in this industry. So really appreciate your service to all of. Donna, before you go, I have to mention that I don't think that you're going to be taken advantage of in any form or way. Cudos to you. Knowledge is power. Sounds like as if you've got a whole lot of it under your belt. and I do have to mention this.

We've been doing the show a long, long time, as you well know, from listening. And you just said that you were under the limit when they saw that scratch. There isn't one caller, one person, anyone that's following us that I can remember has shared that information with me. Good for you, that little scratch. There's a lot of consumers out there that have tried to turn that. your car in, unbeknownst to them, they didn't take pictures, they didn't, you know, pay attention, and they, you know, get a call back and they say your car is scratched here, here, and here. So, anyway, my compliments to you for, you know, being so savvy.

And thank you so much for calling Earl Stewart on cars. My pleasure. Thanks to you all. Bye-bye now. Bye-bye. Let's get back to some text or anonymous feedbacks. Sure. Rick, you got any over there on YouTube? Actually, I do have one quick one.

Paul DeMore is asking, I want to check on a four-cylinder Camry. He says, what's the price range on the four-cylinder cameras? Sounds like a perfect one for you, Stu. Can you repeat the question slowly? He's just asking, what is the price

range on a four-cylinder camera? I'm guessing a new car. Okay. Most of the Camrys are four-cylinder, and the MSRP to just give you a common thing ranges around 25 up to close to $40,000 depending on the trim level of it most of them are in the upper 20s maybe $26,000 $27,000 that's the transaction price somewhere around there okay okay we can jump over we have anonymous feedback and we have text I will get a text here that's from Brian Brian says oh gosh it's a long hi Brian's California thank you for the great advice from last week I told you guys about my 2018 Mustang GT that has excessive transmission wine in the first, the third gear. I wanted update and clarify a few things.

When their lead master tech drove the car, I was in the passenger seat with them the entire time. He was able to create the noise over and over. I kept telling him that this isn't normal. He kept telling me he appreciates my attention to detail, but the car is fine. He's driven hundreds of them. Most likely, as Rick said, they're trying to avoid opening up. up a can of worms on this thing until the car completely self-destructs rick recommended trying a different ford dealer i scheduled an appointment with the biggest dealership in california a day before

my appointment they canceled me and said they don't have enough text to look at my car because of covid i then decided to talk with a very well-respected independent mechanic about it they told me i had two options one sell the car or two drive it until the car completely breaks then try to hold forward accountable for it they said either way you're in for a battle. It's frustrating because I still love the car and it drives fine, but it sounds wrong, and I know it isn't right.

It turns out they know this transmission is troubled. They came out with an updated one after my car was produced and will only give it to you if your transmission is completely destroyed. I have no idea what to do. Thanks as always for the show and for listening to my misfortune, and that's from Brian out in California.

Brian, what I advise you to do is make it a point to go back to another Ford dealer, It doesn't have to be the largest one in California, but you probably ought to check with at least, unless you get the right answer the first time, two or three other Ford dealers. Mechanics are just like doctors, and you've got good ones.

You know what they call a doctor who graduates last in his medical class? I know. What's that? Doctor. A doctor. And that's what they call a mechanic or a technician. They call a Ford technician, but the one that graduated last in his class,

they also called a Ford technician. So I would go to, even back to the dealership to get a different technician, although it would be preferable to go to a different car dealership, and then ask for somebody that's a certified, this ASC certified, especially in transmissions. You're better off to get someone that's ASC. That's like the Apple Sam Echo and stands for... Auto-move service excellence. Auto-motive service, excellence.

Find a technician at a Ford dealership that is qualified, in transmissions, auto service excellence, and also in as many others, you have some that are certified in everything, right, right? Yes. So a guy that's certified in everything, ASC, he has done a lot of schooling, he's learned a lot, and he has to keep up.

He has to go back every other year? Actually, ASC has to be recertified every five years. Every five years. But depending upon the dealer or the manufacturer, Those certifications may have to be updated every year for, say, Toyota-specific or Ford-specific. Yeah, a technician has no reason to defend Ford in the mistakes they made. And if they did design the car wrong, a technician wants to fix the car because he gets paid a commission. So if you get a real smart technician and your car's out of warranty, he's going to tell you what he can do to fix it because he gets paid for that.

If he tells you it's normal, then he's not going to get paid. So I think you should try two other dealers or at least two other technicians and be sure they're well qualified. I think you'll solve your problem. All right. Okay. We'll jump over to some anonymous feedback. Here's a simple question that we could probably talk about it all day,

but what caused the used car market to go crazy this year? Yeah, as supply and demand, I mean, if you've ever taken the course in economics, whether you're selling lawnmores or television sets or cars, when you have more buyers than you have sellers or product, the price soar. So we have this unexpected. I think that's the big thing. When the pandemic hit at my dealership, we thought it was the end of the world. I told my comptroller in accounting, I said, how long can we survive?

we figured we would just stop selling cars. And he did a forecast. He said, well, we could go another 12 months if you don't sell another car. Well, that made me feel better, so I relaxed. But we all car dealers and manufacturers figured it was all over. And then two months later, car dealers and manufacturers are having the best profit months and volume months they have ever had. Quite everybody flat-footed.

Manufacturers couldn't build them fast enough. The dealers couldn't order them and sell them fast enough. And therefore, there's a shortage of good used cars and good new cars. In fact, there's even a shortage of bad new cars and bad used cars. So you're paying the price. You're paying more for every used car you buy, and you're paying a lot more for every new car you buy. And that's just the way it is. And the car dealers love it.

Now, the only thing I could advise you to do is just be sure you get the lowest high price out there. because you're going to pay a good profit to any dealer. Don't pay a ridiculous profit because some of the dealers are using the shortage to make ridiculous profits. That's right. Similar things happening in the housing market. There's just not enough houses sell if you've been paying attention to that, too. It's going crazy.

Well, I started to say the good news is your house is worth a lot more than it's ever been worth. Your car's worth a lot more. So if you have an extra car and it's sitting in the drive when you're not using it. I'm not telling you to go out and buy another car. I'm telling you, put it up for sale, take it to shop at the three or four dealers.

Go to Carvana, go to Vroom, go to CarMax, and you can get more money from that car. We've seen cases of used cars selling for more money than the same new car. MSRP. Yes. Yeah, we're seeing it every day. Yes.

It's crazy. What an amazing time. Did we ever think that we'd be sitting here having this conversation when the pandemic broke? I want to tell you what, there aren't as many people out there that are as lucky who owns a business. And I'll tell you that for that, we're very, very grateful. Do you have any more text, too? Oh, yeah, we've got a whole bunch of them.

Jump over here's a cool one. I like these. It says it's very exciting that Toyota is releasing the new 2022 BZ4X electric vehicle later this year. Indeed. My question is, does your dealership have electric charging stations? Will toy dealers be required to install these as more and more EVs come out? We do. We have six charge point stations.

They're part of the national charge point network, and they're there for, they're available to the public, and they'll be used also as we start to get electric vehicles to sell. I think it's okay right now, considering the anticipated volume, but in time, we're going to need to add more, and they're not cheap. but yeah but manufacturers across the country will be requiring their dealers as they start making EVs

and it's just going to be like a change in the infrastructure at a dealership so they're going to have to wire up their lots and at some point I would imagine they're going to have to have a charging station for nearly every car that they got in stock because they'd have to sell these cars

and demonstrate them so yeah things are changing really quickly and I'm personally pleased that Toyota finally got on the bandwagon but yeah we're ready for it. Rick's got a point For those that don't know, the Toyota BZ is a joint venture with Subaru, and it's going to be an electric sport utility vehicle. Not very big, but it's going to be a pretty good size.

It's going to look like a Rav4. Yep, and it'll be full electric, but it's going to be sold both by Toyota and Subaru, just rebadged. Different names, yeah. But, yep, joint venture. While we're talking about electric cars, I want to bring this up in the current weekly automotive news that's a trade journal for every every car dealer reads it and every auto manufacturer reads it they are offering customer incentives on certain

cars they sell and you see incentives from manufacturers that are having a hard time selling cars which isn't very many these days but they still have incentives and of course they have incentives on 2020s so they can clean those out and and sell their 2021s the thing that surprised me is the Chevrolet Bolt. The Chevrolet Bolt, of course, is their electric car, one of the first production electric cars, General Motors had,

and the Chevrolet Bolt, on their 2021 models, a brand new bolt, has rebates, customer rebates, up to $5,000. And you would say, why would they do that? I don't know. I mean, I don't have all the answers, but we're talking electric is such a thing today,

Tesla is being the hero and everybody's going to make electric vehicles. Why does General Motors have to give the customer $5,000 to buy a 2021 bolt? Now here's something even more surprising. Because no one wants to buy it. On the, on the 2020 models, they're offering a rebate also. So it just doesn't make any sense to me. me why Chevrolet would be doing it. They're offering $9,000, from $7,000 to $9,000 on the 2020 bolt and from $1,000 to $9,000

on the 2020, 2021. So interesting, Rick. It's an unattractive little car? Well, it is unattractive, but it's electric, so, you know. And it's in the eyes of the holder. People probably people out there that have bulls who think they're pretty young. Yeah. Yeah, there were folks that like the Pontiac Aztec too.

That's true. Walter White. Stu, I have a question for you. Are you and your family ready for an electric car? Yeah. Actually, I'm going to try one out for a little bit. We have a Tesla coming into use car inventory and I'm going to see how it's like driving that. Yeah.

With your family in the car or you just? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And my son, actually, I drove my son's car today. because we sold my car. My son drives a Prius Prime, which is a plug-in hybrid. So it drives for, I think, like 40 miles on all-electric mode

at regular speeds, and then the hybrid kicks in. So we're kind of dipping our toe and kind of, you know, easing into the... And Jake, you know, I never have to put a gas in the car, because he drives, really small distances, and he just lives, he's driving the car 100% of electricity. Yeah, it says his miles per gallon on there, and it's a 99.9. It only has one decimal point, so I imagine it's not.

99.99.9999.99.99. That's a great story. You know, there's a whole lot of people out there that aren't really interested in the electric vehicle. So they're not interesting. Well, we have a text here. Someone's listening. Yeah, they're listening to our conversation here. So one said, speaking of electric cars, I am sure you have read about the Tesla crash in the papers. Aside from the questions about the safety of self-driving cars, how did that car that crash catch fire and burn? I thought they had no gas. And that's from Gerard. And he's up in the villages. I think that until the investigative team completes their whole background check on this, you know, I think there are a lot of people that will want to jump to a conclusion. Actually, it was a battery. The battery, a lithium battery, is what burned. Exactly. And that's what caused the car to be totally destroyed.

It took about 32,000 gallons of water to put that battery out. But these first responders were not, you know, they weren't privy to the situation. as to what to do. They even were calling Tesla to find that, you know, how to put that fire off, because it burned for four hours. And on the first week in May, I'm actually going to be doing training with the Dequest to Fire Department for hybrids and electric vehicles. Great.

So it's interesting that this occurred in such timing. I've been doing a huge amount of research on this. what happens is the lithium battery catches fire because of short circuits and then it creates a cascade effect the reason that they had to use a massive amount of water which they did not use 30,000 gallons it was actually closer to about 10,000 gallons

that fire department actually had information in advance they knew how to handle the situation they did not contact Tesla They did, because actually Tesla has out a program where you can access on their website information on exactly for first responders how to handle these cars in a fire situation. And basically what they're doing is they've got to cool the battery unit because it's all contained. So in order to put that fire out and stop it, they had to use massive amounts of water to flood it and cool it down to the point that it could not continue. that chain reaction fire inside the battery unit yeah it's like a nuclear meltdown

there exactly it's a very it's actually a very complex situation and it requires a lot of time because one of the requirements is that the first responders have to be sure that that car is air temperature throughout the entire battery system for over 45 minutes before they're allowed to release it to the tow truck companies that are going to take that car to a tow yard and even then the vehicle has to be isolated away from other vehicles and any flammable source. Yeah, let me say one more thing. Just the case has a problem.

Let's say one more thing and let's cut this short because this is a long conversation. They're a project. Elon Musk said that the driver was not on the driver's seat and I believe him. And so I think the whole thing here is that they have no evidence that the driver was not in the driver's seat is what they said. There's a whole lot of stuff that has to come out about this, and let's move on. Yeah, that special investigation by that team is really important. We'll watch for that. 877-960-99-60, or you can text us at 772-497-2-497-6530.

We're going to go back to the phones where we have John from Palm City. Good morning, John. Good morning to everyone. I want to read the headlines. Today's paper. Very serious problem. Right on the headlines, today, ship shortage creates chaos for carmakers. Auto production cuts, hamper, recovery.

Now, this is so serious. These are the semiconductors. They control a lot of things like fuel injection, cruise control, tire pressure. It's a major shortage. It's so bad that in February, General Motors closed completely their Kansas City plant because of the shortage. This is going out throughout the world, and unfortunately, some of the carmakers, like Mercedes and Porsche, are stacking up on them, and they're concentrating just to use their supplies on the top models. They're concentrating on that because they're make more money on it, but it's definitely a hardship, and it's a problem on new car availability. So it's very serious, serious enough, like I say, to put it in today's paper,

right at headlines, and I don't think it's going to get any better. It's making supply shortage. So I just want to point that out, and dealers are going to be hurting from it. They probably are already. It's a semiconductor shortage nationwide. Yeah, all products, not just automobiles. refrigerators cost more money, telephones cost more money, toasters cost more money.

Everything's got a chip in it and today. So the shortage of microchips is going to affect prices. You know, if I were worried and I were an economist, I'd be talking inflation because it's going to flex supply and demand. It's going to lower the supply. Demand will continue to stay high and the prices are going to raise until supply equals demand. Then you have inflation.

unfortunately a lot of these semiconductors like you mentioned refrigerators the semiconductors are being concentrated on items that they sell like cell phones so they get priority to other electronics other than the automobile one other further thing about two weeks ago a question somebody called in and asked them about their battery in the Toyota Camry well It's very easy to solve that problem. If you go to Walmart, Walmart sells an ever-start battery. That's made by the biggest company, Johnson Control Company, which, by the way, makes the battery for Toyota. So they have plenty in stock for all models, all cars, and especially the different models of Camry. And it's available, and they'll store the battery at no charge for you.

You buy the battery, and they have three different types. Not sure you want to buy the best one. I think it's five years or more on warranty, and after three years, it's a full warranty with no questions asked. What are they charged me, John? You want to mention that. There's no shortage. Any Walmart store, and it's an ever-start battery,

and they make it for all cars and all models, and it is produced by Johnson Control Company, which makes it for the many manufacturers. How much does it cost? They're around $100, $125, depending. Like I say, there's three different grades. You can buy one low one without a good warranty on it,

I think for about $69 or $70. I didn't know that Walmart did installations free on batteries. That's good information. Yes, no charge. Thank you very much. Ever start. When you do it yourself, you have to reset all the electronics, so they take care of all of that when they're putting it in.

That's great. Great. Yeah. You could probably buy it online and then bring your car in and have them put it in for you. What a great way to buy a battery. Absolutely. And it is made by the big company, Johnson Control. Johnson Control, the biggest, yeah.

And it makes it for many of the manufacturers. Boy, I tell you what, I love your calls, John. You always give us very valuable information. I can't thank you enough for being a regular caller. Well, that was great. Thank you. Look forward to the shopping. again. Thank you. Give us a call again, John.

All right, we've got a text on from Jonathan. It says, good morning. It seems that thanks to COVID, the price of everything has gone up. I've noted this when grocery shopping and dining out. Has the retail price of cars gone up as well? Oh, yeah. Yeah. See, the retail price of cars is what the dealer can get. It's not. MSRP is, was a great idea. In 1958, they passed that law about the and Roney label, but the dealers are ignoring it. So the MSRPs might not be changing, but the effective selling price is soaring.

And the dealers call it their gross profit, and that is how much they sell the car for over their true cost. And I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't doubled, Stu. I think that for a lot of dealers, on the average, the average margin, the gross profit was probably double. Oh, easily. I can say in Toyota's, even though Toyota has restrictions on what their dealers can advertise, the transaction price was conducted. I know we said invoice is a BS term, but I'm just using it as a reference point. Transaction price was well below invoice. That still, deals were making money, but now the transaction price has

probably swung around to an equal amount over invoice. So it's, I would say easily the percentage of margin is doubled. And the difficulty with dealers had, Because some manufacturers, a lot of manufacturers, will not allow the dealers to advertise the price of a car below invoice. And now with the high supply, low demand, whereas like about half the cars used to be sold below invoice, as you heard Sue just say, practically no cars. Yeah, we can advertise, and most dealers can advertise over invoice now, which was weird last year.

Yeah, yeah, okay. Okay, we're going to go back to the phones, and where we have, Well, first, let me mention I have $50 for the next female caller. Give us a call, take advantage of it. You win yourself, $50. If you haven't called the show before. If you are a first-time caller, please, ladies, help me support the platform that you so look forward to 877-960. 9960 that's $50 for the first new lady caller and as you heard earlier we have had a female caller

so don't let that $50 go to waste put that rate in your pocket give us a call voice your opinion 877 960 9960 now we're going to go to howard who's calling us from jupiter he's a regular caller good morning how's everything with you guys there perfect Good. Okay. I disagree with John this time. I usually don't, but I think you should go to consumers report and check the batteries first before you go to Walmart and have it and sold. Also, Toyota gives you a seven-year warranty instead of five-year warranty if you buy the battery from Toyota. I'm not saying that you should, but I want you to know all the information. So that's just all I have to say today. Yeah, you're right, Howard, definitely. They really break it down in Consumer Report on the batteries.

And one thing about battery warranties that everybody probably knows, but I'll repeat it just in case some don't, the battery warranty only reimburses you for the remaining life. So if you have a seven-year warranty on a battery and the battery is six years old, you're only going to get one-seventh of the value of that, battery toward the purchase of another battery.

So it sounds better than it really is. It's on the unused portion of your battery that you get reimbursed if it fails. Okay, great. Okay, thank you very much, and have a nice day. Thank you. Thank you, Howard. Thank you, Howard. 877-960

or you can text us out 772-4976530. Zero. Okay, we got a text here. There's no name on it. It says, I was told by my private mechanic that I needed to change my timing belt. He said that while he was working in that location, he should change out the water pump. I asked if there was something wrong with it, and he said, no, it just made sense to do it because he would have to basically disassemble the motor to reach that area, and it would be very expensive to have to go back in there to fix it when it does actually go. First question, is this true? Second question. Why does Honda make an engine that requires so much disassembly to fix such an important component? Sounds like a Rick question to me. Most cars with timing belts, the timing belt runs the water pump. It's one of the components in there. Water pumps, well, they do fail.

Most of the time when we're recommending a timing belt replacement, we would recommend the water pump at the same time. However, now most of our Toyotas have gone to a timing chain, and the water pump is external and it's not run by that chain system so Honda of course some of theirs they still run a belt and

because the water pumps do wear out yet it's actually not a bad idea to at least give a really really close inspection on it and if it's an older pump it might be worthwhile to go ahead and invest having it replaced because it's only the cost of the part at that point

there's really not a lot of additional labor to replace it thinking about how long you're going to keep the car too. If you're going to keep the car for a long time, then Rick is right. Eventually, you're going to have to replace the water pump, and it would cost you a lot less to do it at the same time. But they're going to be trading that car in a year and your water pump looks good, or even if you're going to trade the car in two years and your water pump looks good, you probably don't have to have it replaced. Let the next guy that buys your trade in worry about it. Yep. Okay, great. Let's see here. Anonymous feedback?

And here's a, here's one. Why are you still wearing masks in the studio? Oh, I just, I still doesn't even know this because he got here late. We have a special announcement. Next Saturday, we're going to be maskless. Jonathan's getting his second vaccination. And Jonathan's about 20 feet away from the rest of us anyway. And so Saturday will be the first maskless day for Earl on Cars.

This coming Saturday. And how long it's been? Since April. or March the last year. Yeah. And let me tell you, I don't know whether you care or not, but these masks are terrible.

I mean, we're going to start smiling now? Yeah, I'm so looking forward to it. We're all going to be sitting here and you're going to see at least one very ugly person, that's me, and then a beautiful person, that's Nancy, and the rest of them, they're all right. We're in between.

Yeah. All right. Jonathan's going to have to put like a big blob of Vaseline on all the cameras now. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I can't wait until next Saturday. I know. I'll have to trim my beard for the first time.

It's actually coiled around inside my mask. I haven't taken it out. Hey, get your together. And that's no shenanigans, Jonathan. And to answer the question, let me address the question. Why do we wear the mask? Nancy and I were vaccinated. We got both our vaccinations months ago. And we wore the mask anyway, not to protect us, but to protect the others.

When you have the vaccination, you're not going to get COVID, but you can transmit COVID. A lot of people don't understand that. So if you've had your vaccination and you're going out to public, Sir Costco, you want to wear your mask anyway. The only reason we're not going to wear our mask next Saturday is because everybody in here will be vaccinated. I had dinner with some friends, lunch with some friends for the first time about a month ago. And every one of us was vaccinated. and we went to lunch together and felt comfortable without masks. So that's the reason.

Yeah, lucky you. 877-960-9960, or you can text us at 772-497-60. I really hope that we answered your question about that mask that you sent to him as there's a whole lot of people that are asking the same question. But there are more people, I'd say in publics that have a mask on, aren't even a lot in the store if they don't have one on. Okay, dokey.

All right, anonymous feedback. On your mystery shop of Lexus of Palm Beach, I'm always leery of Auto Nation dealerships. Their fees are ridiculous, and I can always easily beat their deals. I don't know how they are number one in the nation. Auto Nation,

very astute of you about automation. Their new car prices are deliberately, they were deliberately higher before the pandemic, and now they're even higher. So AutoNation decided not to try to compete vigorously on new car sales and to instead lower their prices, they're competing, but they're lowering their prices and accepting the lower amount of sales.

So all around the country, relatively speaking, Auto Nation stores didn't sell as many new cars. to lower the prices. And they don't care about the profit because they're making it in the finance department. And they focused on the finance department and they're making $2,000 on the average for every car. That's an average because sometimes they don't finance the car, but every new car, an automation dealership sells, they're making $2,000 in finance. That's more money than anybody else.

The new car profit is something else. You can get a good price, relatively good price, on a car in an auto-nation dealership, on the car itself. But stay out of the finance department, use your own bank or credit union, because that's where they're making the home runs. Okay. Let's see. I have a break, this is anonymous feedback. I have a brake squeal on a 2021 forerunner with only 900 miles now. I'm guessing there's, that's a new problem that many new Toyota owners are experiencing.

I'm going to go to Rick because I haven't heard about that. I haven't heard of any real, a lot of reports of it. Rex squeal, 2021, forerunner. One of the things that we do know, especially here in South Florida, is breaks overnight will get a light layer of rust on the rotors. It's just because of the material that's used. So sometimes you'll hear some noise the first couple times you step on the brakes in the morning. That part is normal.

but if you've got a squeal that's continuing throughout the day then that's definitely something you're going to want to have inspected by your dealership and obviously that's covered under warranty for the first three years 36,000 miles remember that also depends on where you live in Florida if you live in the middle of state less frequently they have that problem if you live near on the ocean our dealership is very near the ocean we have a lot of customers that live in condominiums on the ocean directly on the ocean, parked their cars

and the garages, and it is very common if you're near the salt air living on the ocean that you get rust on everything, including your brake rotors. Absolutely. As a matter of fact, there are some cars that when they come in, we can tell which side faces the ocean because of the amount of rust on one side versus the other. I'm seeing a smattering of posts on various forums,

no consistent year. I searched break squealing noise, 20-21, 4-runner. I saw some on some 2020s, 2017, just a few things. There doesn't seem to be a lot or then they kind of be scattered. It seems like break noises

a lot of the times, I don't mean to sound like I'm putting this back on to the owner, but a lot of the times is things like places that you drive, like if you're out in the acreage or locks a hatchy on dirty roads, dust or sand can get in on the pads and that will make a little bit of noise.

it's not a safety issue, it just makes them a bit noisier at times. Yeah. Okay, jumping over to another text. It says, I bought a new explorer three days ago. I noticed I had an almost flat tire yesterday morning, and so I drove it to the dealership before it went flat. That's a pretty risky move there. They found a screw in the sidewalk.

They said I needed a new tire. I protested because I just bought it. I disagree with them that they said that just because I recently bought it, I had the same chance of getting a flat as if I had driven it for years. I disagree. The math is simple. A flat in three days is very high odds because of less days, right? There is a higher chance of getting a nail in your tire than newer the car. Who can I speak to about getting satisfaction? Well, it's a judgment call, and I think a good dealer would give you the benefit of the doubt. Because as you say, there's a distinct possibility that that screw could have been there for a while,

or maybe just before you took delivery. Chances are it wasn't there, but who cares? If there's a 20% chance the dealer's guilty, they should step up and take care of it. Because then they have a happy customer. You'll buy another car from them, and you'll tell all of your friends what they did the right thing. So it's a judgment call by the dealer, and I think, you should go to the top guy. You should go to the owner of the dealership or the general manager and be courteous and respectful and explain your situation. So yeah, it could have been in there

when I bought it, but it might not have been. And what if it was? Maybe they'll compromise with you and split the cost of the tire, which is better than nothing. Yeah, I wouldn't press ahead with the argument about the probability. I would just say as your experience as a new owner of a brand new explorer was just terrible because right away and I think just some sympathy and just a little concern for your experience that they should work with you they don't have to but they should dealers have a column on their financial statements it's called policy adjustment a policy adjustment is accounting term for doing free work to keep somebody happy when you don't owe it to them in other words it's not covered under warranty it's uh it's not your fault you didn't make a mistake

but policy and a good dealer spends a lot of money on policy because a good dealer will realize it doesn't make any difference whether the customer's right or wrong. If the customer believes she's right, you better take care of her because

if you don't, she's going to tell everybody she knows that she got screwed by you. And how many cars will not be bought because of saving $100 or $200 on policy adjustment, you might have sold three more cars is a result of doing the thing you didn't have to do.

That's right. And also, just remind you that if you bought a Ford Explorer, a big SUV three days ago, I promise you that the dealership made a healthy profit on that sale. And I'm going to guess on a vehicle like that, the wheels are maybe $200 a piece, right? Something like that? Let's say $250. Probably around $180 to $200 for the tire. The dealer costs.

It ain't cheap, but the dealer could definitely afford. to flip you back a couple hundred bucks to make you happy you know it's amazing how advertisement goes word of math wow powerful ladies I have $50 here for the first and second new lady caller anything at all if you want to share it with us how your transaction went or didn't go this weekend maybe a question what is the most Well, comfort, does that come into play, you know, for the second or for the first choice? Give me a call. Let me know how everything went with you.

877-960-99-60, and you can text us at 772-497-2-497-6-5-30. Okay. I can jump over to a text here. That's one for Rick specifically. It's from Joe in Boynton. He says, Rick, I have continental tires wearing out early. Treadware number 500, and the tires only have 24,000 miles. Is there a warranty on this product?

Thanks. You'd have to check with the place where you bought the tires. Unless these are the first set of tires on your brand new car, which I will give one little caveat there. the tire manufacturers make special tires for brand new cars to go on the original set and they're a softer compound tire so that when you get in that brand new car they ride nice and soft and smooth and then when you go to replace them the new tires are of course the regular compound that it's meant to be a lot longer lasting so 24,000 miles on the original set of

Tires may be a very reasonable amount, but if they've already been replaced once and they're wearing out that fast, I would talk to the place where you bought them and see if there is a treadware warranty and preserve it from that direction. And it's rare to have a treadware warranty. And also your treadwear depends on your driving habits. You take 10 people and give the exact same car, the exact same set of tires, and you will have different treadware on all 10 people. Everybody drives in different places over different roads. They break or don't break, or they ride faster, or they don't ride faster, they take corners fast, or they don't take corners fast. It's a very, very variable.

We see it all the time, and some people get an extraordinary number of miles on a set of tires, and another person will get half that, just depending on the way they drive the car. Okay. Next question came in here. It's anonymous feedback. Oh, it wants to log me out. Here we go. What is the invoice on a new Rav4 hybrid?

Would $500 below invoice be a good deal? Well, there's different models. The most popular one is probably an XLE, and invoice on an XLE. Well, it's got an MSRP of about 315. Invoices about $30,600. That doesn't mean that's the cost. There's about $2,500, $3,000 of profit built in there. So the invoices, say, $30,600, $500 below invoice would be an amazing deal now.

Waiting six months down the road, it might be a common deal. The profit of the dealer would be about $2,500, which is, for normal times, would be a good profit. And as Stu says, because of supply and demand, it would be a very good deal today. You can't buy a new Ramp 4 hybrid. Right. We're currently 300 over invoice on Rav4 hybrids right now. Yeah, and that's a good price. Right, it's a very good price, and if we lowered it,

we would sell out of Rav4s instantly, and then we couldn't sell any more cars. So that's kind of like the economic force is a supply and demand. I mean, on an individual dealership's point of view, it's a huge advantage, but you really can't fight it. I mean, if you did, you couldn't replace your cars. And it takes us back to my, actually, my rule. I don't try to buy a car from one dealer based on the discount from MSRP or invoice or anything else. The only way you're going to get the lowest price in your marketplace is to take that same car and go to three or four different dealerships

and also check Costco. Also check automation. If you have an America Express card, you get a special deal. If you have Costco members, sometimes you get a special deal. You have to work outside. You can't take any specific formula on invoice or MSRP. As long as you're dealing with the same dealer, he can be making a ton of money, but the discount sounds good. I just read off some incentives here that all dealers are getting, customers are getting too. So when you take dealer cash, customer cash, and normal markups and holdbacks,

You can be looking $10,000, $12,000 mark over MSRP. And the guy can say, I'll give you an $8,000 discount from MSRP, and he's still making $4,000, which is a lot of money to make on a new car today. I think we're going to have to go to, we're going to have to go to the phones first. Yeah, priority phones. We have a caller from Boynton Beach, and that's a Mochere. Good morning. Good morning.

How are you today? Good. Terrific. How are you guys? Fine. Thank you. Good, good, good. It's the first time I'm calling and actually I emailed earlier yesterday and he told me about your program

and so forth. So I'm very happy to be and I've been listening since 8 o'clock, which usually I don't do. Oh, thank you for joining us. May I get my problem? Thank you for having your program. Oh, thank you very much for listening. I really, I remember our conversation. What was your name?

Moshe M-O-N-A-M-O-A-M-A-M-Hah, yeah, right, sure, I got your email. I really enjoyed our dialogue. Tell me what's on your mind, Mosher. Okay, here is my story. It's the first time that I've leased the car. It's due to come back to the dealer, which is Schumacher. It's a Jeep Cherokee, 2019. The lease is due to be over in October 21.

of this year. Right. Now, being that we are snowbirds, and we're going back on May 21, and we were going to go until October sometimes, I figured, why have the car sit in the garage, pay my monthly fee and insurance on the car, even though I can probably get a reduction, why not try to either sell it or return it early or get rid of it early,

and I am not ready to give it back and take another car lease because I'm not going to bear until October. So reading YouTube and different gurus like yourself, trying to educate myself, the suggestion came up that I should try to do a buyout from the bank, Ally Bank, which is the financial institution, and I should take this car to buy it from Ally, and then maybe I can sell it to CarMax or Broome or one of these guys

that you, you know, we buy any car. either come out ahead, you know, even or come out ahead. Some one was suggested, and one guy even came out and said you can, on YouTube, said you can even negotiate with Ally, and whatever price they determined was going to be the residual price, you can maybe knock it down. So, to my surprise, when I first called Ally, a girl came out on the phone, and she said, oh, you live in Florida. Oh, we cannot disclose you any prices.

I said, what do you mean you can't disclose me in his prices? You lent me the money. I'm paying you monthly. Go to the dealers. I went to the Schumacher, and I'm talking to the guys. Very nice. And they said, oh, no, you don't talk to us. We are just the middleman.

We are the matchmaker. It's you and the bank. The band owes the car. Go back to the bank. I said, they call me to come. No, no, no, go back to the bank. Call the bank the second time. Another girl comes on.

Oh, you live in Florida. We cannot deal with you directly. You have to go through the dealer. I said, what? It's a Florida law. I hung up, and I'm getting a little steam in my coming out of my ears, but I've been shut up. I learned that from my wife long ago.

I called back the third time yesterday. I'm almost finishing my story. Bear with me, please, because this might be useful for other Florida clients. So I called back third time. same thing another girl i said wait a minute i said i know i know what's your name julia julia you sound very nice i know that you did not write the law but tell me does it make sense i should go back to the dealer if i'm dealing with you sorry it's a state law i said what is the law you can't tell me anything she says this the state law is that we cannot we cannot we cannot

we cannot buy out the car from us the dealer must buy it for you i said so what What are you suggesting? He says, go to the dealer, have the dealer call us, and then the dealer will tell you. I said, that's a setup. In other words, I'm going to sit in the dealer's office. He's going to pick up the phone, call you, Ally, and he's holding the phone, and you're going to tell him, oh, the buyout is $21,000, and he's going to turn to me, and he's going to say, oh, it's 25,000, because he wants to put $4,000 in his pocket. This is a setup. Well, Moshe, that's a great thing.

story. That's the reason I asked you to call the show this morning. And this is something that I haven't covered on the show adequately. And you also ask, we talked about some other issues too, which is you, the dealer can also, he's going to charge you a hidden fee. He's going to charge you hidden fees on top of the residual value. Now, what the dealer hasn't told you, and I haven't mentioned to you is there is a residual value on your lease contract. So if you will look at your lease contract, the price... I don't have it. Well, they have to give you a copy of it by law.

You need to tell the dealer, you need a copy of the contract. It could also tell Ally to send you a copy of the contract. They both have copies. And by law, they have to give you that. They will tell you what your residual value is. And that's a locked-in price. They're also going to charge you a disposition fee, and that's in, that is in the contract, too. It could be $500 or $700 in that order of magnitude.

They're going to charge you that disposition fee on top of the residual value, which is stupid and shouldn't be, but it's one of these things that were, it's a gotcha, a fine print, gotcha. The nasty part about this, Mosher, is the fact that the dealer can charge anything he wants to use. and call it a dealer fee. Florida allows him to charge, if he wanted to charge you $500 for a dealer fee or $5,000 for a dealer fee, that is legal in Florida.

And he can add that. The only thing you have control over at this point, and this is what I want all of our listeners to understand, when you have to exercise your option to purchase your lease car at the residual value that's on your contract, you'll find out very quickly if it's a good deal or a bad deal. And today's market with retail prices of used cars soaring

is a high likelihood this could be a very good deal for you. And therefore, you'll find out what it is. Take the car at the residual value and shop other. You said, Schumacher, is this a, what make car is it? Jeep Cherokee. Jeep, okay. 2019, Jeep Cherokee. Go to two or three other, Napleton,

and a couple of other dealers. And find a Jeep dealer somewhere. You've got Rigo, there's another Jeep dealer. Try to find three or as many as you can as you have time for, and find out the one that will charge you the lowest dealer fee, hidden fee. And that's the only way you're gonna save money. You're gonna have to pay the disposition fee

because that goes to ally. And I'm surprised they didn't mention that. And the point about Florida law is, really makes me angry because other states don't have that. In Florida, the auto dealers associations and the dealers have lobbied the Florida legislature, making, changing the law, saying that the dealer is acting as if it was his car and he's selling it to you when, in fact, the car belongs to ally. So it's an artificial thing lobbied in because the dealers give. the Attorney General and the state senators and congressmen elected and their political action

committees lobbied this law in to screw customers, and that's what's happening. Now, having heard what you said, may I ask about the following scenario to avert these hitting fees possibly? Okay. This is what I'm thinking, and please advise me. What if, instead of going back to the dealer and having the dealer buy the dealer by the the car for me from Ally, which is what they told me is the Florida law. What if instead I go tomorrow or whenever to Carmack's or to room, and I say to them, listen, you are a dealer.

Ally told me I can go to any dealer and have any dealer buy the car for me. It doesn't have to be Schumacher or whoever you said. How about you, Mr. Carmex? You arrange the buyout for me today or at the time of determination of the disposition. Either way, you are the dealer, you arrange it for me, and I will sell it to you. Motion, I think if Ally told you could take it to Carmack's or a non-jeep dealer, I think they were mistaken. You probably have to take it to a franchise Jeep dealer in Florida. If they allow you to, that would be a major. your breaking news. They might. I was thinking it's not a captive lender. It's not like

Southeast Toyota Finance, for example, I was going to tell you to take it to a Toyota dealership. Maybe Ally, since it's an independent, they don't care as long as they get paid for it. That is going to be the biggest news on this show in a long time. I'm dying to find out. Do exactly what you suggest. Go to Carmack's and see what they say. I'd love to hear about that. ASAP. I will be happy to tell you what happened, too. Fantastic. Well, I love this show. I have a question about sales tax, guys, sales tax. I was told that if I buy the car out, whether the disposition at the end or tomorrow, whichever, at the time that I will buy the car,

I, the buyer will have to pay a 7% sales tax. That's true. That's true, yes. On top of all these hidden fees, my question, if I go to CarMax, which is what I was suggesting, and I buy, buy the car and sell it on the same day, do I still have to pay sales tax? Yeah. Yeah, the State Department of Motor Vehicles would catch you on that. They track the transactions carefully, and you're not going to get away with not paid your sales tax in Florida.

Yeah, CarMax doesn't want to be on the hook either. Just because I purchased the car and sold it to CarMax five minutes later, the fact that I did the purchase, I got to pay the 7% taxes. Yeah, they get you on that. I would say you can try, but you won't get away with it. Because originally you didn't pay sales tax on the whole car, it was just on the total of the payments or whatever down payment you paid. And in this great conversation, you got my thinking going. I thought about, I wonder what would happen if you called a dealer out of state,

a Jeep dealer. Assuming you can't sell it to car, I sure hope you can. But if it has to be a Jeep dealer, you could call a dealer out of state and maybe work something with them. Maybe that's not a good idea. Let's hear about Carmags. Guys, I have one last question, but if time does not allow, we'll say goodbye, and I'll call some other time. No, listen, you're the best caller we've had in two months.

Let's hear your other question. Wonderful. My question is as follows. When I first heard about this disposition fee, what you said, which is the hidden feet, I started listening again, YouTube, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Turns out that you said it yet, it's a manufactured kind of a fee, that basically what I read is it really to cover the cost of the dealership to prepare the car to put it on the used car sales lot.

That angered me immensely why, because just because I'm returning the car to the dealer and he has to prepare it, I have to cover that cost. That's not even true. So that fee goes to ally. It's an ally, the disposition fee goes to the lender. So now here is my other question, being that they said that if you take another lease immediately, they can waive the fee. Right.

So my question is, if this is a waverable fee, means it's, like you said, it's a manufactured fee that they invented. Yes. Stick it to you. What happens if I say, I'm sorry, I don't want to pay this? They'll send you the collections. I'm not paying this fee. They'll send you the collections that's in your contract with the ally. Yeah, Mosher, all.

Because it was... You hit on one of the... They have the legal right to charge me for that? They do. You know, if I had more time, I'd go hire a lawyer and try a class action suit. There's so many things that are lobbied into Florida law that are not legal. The lawmakers are making laws that should not be legal. The court should overturn them.

But a class action suit, if you've got a good enough lawyer, and my theory is, you could hit the manufacturers for a huge amount of money, and the dealers, and it would really be an amazing, but you need a good lawyer, and it's hard to find somebody that will take that on contingency. Well, I'll tell you something. If you three guys want to get started, I'm the fourth underclass. I got your contact information, motion.

You sound like my kind of guy. Thank you so much. I have an invitation for you. Why don't you sign up for Earl's vigilantes? I'm going to sign you up whether you want to or not. You're a vigilante. I'm going to send you a hat. You're definitely an asset.

Thanks very much, Georgia. Thanks for the call. You better call next week or I'll come looking for you. We'll do that, man. Bye. Bye-bye. Give us a call again. Please stay in touch. We are going to go back to YouTube. We do have one or two here. Paul is asking, how long till the market stabilizes so it would be a good time to buy a new car at a normal price? Well, I can tell you that the semiconductor shortage, they don't expect it letting up for most manufacturers until well-intosh.

next year some manufacturers are faring a little bit better don't want to plug Toyota too much to it anticipates this people will feel this through the summer and then it will get better but most manufacturers have forecasted difficulties in production into well into 2022 so it's going to be with us for a while yeah i think uh you're not having a crystal ball i don't know how long it's going to be but as stew said uh because microchips are used in everything everything built today has got a microchip in it and world demand is going to be soaring and remember it's not a US thing it's a world thing and and the different countries around the world all competing for microchips different manufacturers competing for microchips and all that competition and

demand just means inflation and higher prices and you're caught in the middle the only thing you do you're going to pay a high price for a car and you just have to pay the lowest high price you can yet but you're not going to steal a car today if you buy a car that dealer will make a profit yeah i've got a story that i would like to just kind of do a quick report on because this is not made it in any of the major news sources and it should be january nine of this year a gentleman in south carolina was driving a 2002 honda he was involved in an accident the airbag went off he received injuries to the lower side of his face, which turned fatal. The NHTSA investigated this accident and has determined, just yesterday it was reported on jalapnick.com, and I verified this,

the NHTSA has determined that the airbag inflator produced by Takata in this car ruptured and caused this man's death. this is just this year another person which according to Jalopnik they say it's the 19th person which means it could be a hundred and 90th person had um

did they know that he ever was a recall done on that prior or he never did it or this car has been through multiple owners the current registered owner of the car at the time of the accident was not the driver he apparently had borrowed this car from a friend

the current registered owner had received a notification in November that the recall was still open the parts are available the car could be repaired and he didn't do it it was not done interesting

and this man has lost his life because of this you think the owner has some liability there he well knew I mean it's the family of his friend nobody has a liability with Tacana everybody's forgotten about Tacana With the pandemic and the world crisis and the microchip crisis, Takeda has become yesterday's news. For you folks that haven't been listening to the show for a long time, we were obsessed with Ticada for a long time

and did everything we could to give some attention drawn to it, and we were totally ignored, and this is what's happening. It's the only got to get worse. The older cars are going to rupture airbags more frequently. Another terrible story. Okay, ladies, I've got $50 here for the first two new lady callers. If you were listening, you heard the first one come in, and I'm waiting patiently for you. 877-960-99-60, we still have time. $9.23, $50 win-win situation.

We are going to go to the phones where Nick is calling us from Boston, and he, too, has called before. Good morning, Nick. Hi, good morning, Earl, Nancy, Stu. I hope you guys are doing well. Listen, it's been a little couple months since I've called. I was just thinking, what have you observed in the showroom in terms of closing ratios during the pandemic? Are the closing ratios higher because people are shopping less than only very serious people that are ready to buy are coming? Or just what have you seen and do you think this will be a structural change?

Let me, I'll let Stu answer that. Let me tell everybody what closing ratio means. It's an in-house, a term car dealers used to sell, tell you what percentage of the cars are sold based on the number of customers they talk to. So if 10 customers come in and they make two sales, that's a 20% closing ratio. And the more demand and the more interest and the better the deals, the higher the closing ratio. So I'll let Stu answer that.

Yeah, to answer your question, yes, the closing ratio dealers are selling to a higher percentage of people that visit their showroom or call or send an Internet request. The first part, we thought about this a lot. Some, it was just kind of made common sense. There is a phenomenon in the car business, like when there's really bad weather, when someone bothers to make it through a bad storm to come out to look at a car, they have a higher likelihood of coming out. In other words, they say, well, that's a serious buyer. so now imagine that on a global pandemic scale so the people that were coming out in 2020 were pretty serious about buying a car

a lot of people opted to you know limit their traveling and they don't go into public places so usually it was a needs-based purchase people's leases were ending people's cars were breaking down and they needed to replace it so they were definitely motivated more serious buyers quote unquote now it's continued even though people are coming back out in the world and buying cars and buying everything

else again the inventory shortage is making that a situation which is also increasing the closing ratio customers and it's not usually it's usually it's a bunch of BS when a salesperson tells you that this car might not be here tomorrow these days that's actually true so usually the good inventory needs to get scooped up as quickly as possible so there's an urgency to the to the whole situation so the average dealer closing ratio historically has been around 20% our dealership has been much higher of that than that, but we're seeing dealerships reporting closing ratios

in the 30, 35 percent, 40 percent range, which is really high compared to normal times. Got it. No, thank you. And listen, the other thing I thought I'd share, I don't know if I have any real insight, but it has come to my attention that the number of the captive, you know, finance arms associated with the manufacturers. I think BMW was one specifically, but the OEMs are on to the fact that people are going to dealers or going to CarMax or Froom or Carvana and having their lease vehicles appraised. I did one about, I guess, 16 months ago at this point because I wanted to get rid of it before, so I wouldn't be in possession of the vehicle on the first of the year and no personal property tax, and I did have equity on my lease.

have you guys noticed that and you know do you think that that things like that are going to become more mainstream you know because to somebody that leases especially if you're in an equity position and don't need the vehicle it can be a no-brainer to you know have a dealer have somebody buy it oh absolutely you know and that they're having different residuals if you get it done through a participating dealer and then i think you know they have a different number for car max or probably on a affiliated dealers. Yeah, we talk about that a lot on the show, and it's usually a rare occurrence. It's got to be a special car that has incredibly high residual, high resale value. What we're seeing right now, people are selling their cars. The residuals were set three years ago or even two years ago for X amount of dollars, and the actual value is thousands of dollars higher than that. So people are getting out of their leases early and actually being able to walk away with a check

for the equity in their lease, which like I mentioned, in the past, you'd find like a weird car, you know, like there would be a, I remember what Prius did that we talked about. Yeah, three years ago, the manufacturers who set their residual values didn't anticipate the pandemic. And that's the only way it's a little sort of big. And so unexpected event happened and your residual is something you definitely should look at if you have a lease car. And if you want to speculate, you might even want to think about leasing instead of buying now because, who knows how long the supply thing and microchip shortage will continue. And maybe three years from now, the market still could be going crazy.

But that's a long shot. That's a bet. I wouldn't gamble on it. No, I agree. And I would also just for additional context for people listening, I mean, I definitely wouldn't bet against the actuaries, especially if you're talking to the Corolla or even something like Alexis E.S. or RX where they have lots of data points. In my specific case, I was, I think, 27 months into a 36-month lease on Alexis C.T., and the mileage was way below what the residual was set.

So it was easy for me to have it. I had sold it to Broom. You know, they came, they picked it up, got a check, saved the taxes for my county and my town, and was able to pocket the difference. But it means the captive finance arms are on the P.E. doing that and I guess they want it to go through their pipeline and their channels and they also want people to of course pay the fee because I think you know when you do a sale like that it doesn't impose an administrative burden and I know I play several calls to Lexus financial services you know for me you

know with the lessor and I'm wondering if they're catching up to that you know trying to do that as a deterrent or at a minimum have people you know you know, pay, you know, to hopefully have it go back through their dealers because they're for, you know, good use for... I don't see them steering anybody that way. I mean, I think that even if it's a captive lender, ultimately, they just want to have somebody take that car off their hands. Maybe now they would love to take it to the auction and sell it, which is what they do

if no dealers buy it. So if they're, you know, trying to steal the cars back to the selling dealer or at least the manufacturing dealer, in the past, they would much rather have that dealer, but... it because it's a guaranteed sale. The auction, they take a chance on losing money, especially if they were not, if the residual wasn't properly calculated or they made a mistake. Yeah, Nick, to my knowledge, the captive finance leasing companies are pretty much separate entities. So, you know, Toyota leasing, Toyota finance, and Toyota dealers are really separate. A long time ago, there was a big antitrust suit for GMAC. At that time, there at that time,

they were the captive lender for General Motors, and GMAC was sued, and there was an trustee against GMN GMAC for colluding, and they were working with the dealers, and the law ruled that they're separate legal entities, and they have to look for themselves, and they can't take care of the dealer's interest, and vice versa. So pretty much arm's length between the lender and the leasing company and the dealer today. Got it. Well, hey, well, thanks for all that you guys do advocating for educating consumers and peeling back the curtain as it may be. And thanks for, thanks for sharing. It was nice catching up.

All right. Thanks, Nick. Thank you, Nick. Good rest of your weekend. Stay safe out there. I love Boston, by the way. Yeah. We do, indeed. We'll come up, come visit us sometimes. I'd love to.

Stay in touch, Nick. Okay, we are closing down our phone lines, and we're going to take of Texas and we're going to take YouTube, so take it away. We've gotten the attention to the whole crazy new and use quarter market has got everybody interested. Here's the text that

says, and it's a really good one, I hadn't thought about this. It says, I have a question about resale values. Since prices are overinflated now, will that mean that the depreciation will be even more painful as the market settles? If I pay a thousand dollars more for a new car,

shouldn't I expect a steeper and deeper drop in my car's resale value down the road. Yes. Yes. And I think, nobody has a crystal ball. And when they set lease residuals and when car dealers buy a car at the auction today, in our management meeting our dealership a couple weeks ago, I got into an argument with everybody about the fact that we should be out aggressively buying cars to the auction

because we are running out of use cars. and car dealers have to be very careful. You pay too much money for the car at the auction and you don't sell it in 60 days. You take at the auction, you take a big hit, you lose a lot of money on the car. But if you don't buy the car at the auction, you don't have anything to sell.

So you have, you know, the car business is not an easy business. You have to take chances. And a lot of people out there are driving up used car prices. Carvana, they have a huge amount of money from the initial public offering they did when they went public. They're cash rich, and they go to these auctions and they buy cars at

very high prices, and the dealers get mad because they have to compete at the auction where they buy the car. And then Carvada turns around, marks it up, and sells it, because the public is so hungry for good used cars that they pay more than they should. And you

heard us earlier on the show, if you're listening, we're actually selling used cars and used cars are being sold for over MSRP on the same new car. That's totally insane. And when you have a situation like the pandemic and the microchip shortage, it throws all the laws of economics out the window and it's a savage combat of supply and demand and survival of the fittest. And once the music stops, somebody's going to get hurt. When the music stops and prices drop, the dealers are going to get hurt, and the buyers are going to get hurt. If you own the car, huge depreciation.

You're absolutely right. Okay. All right, we'll go rapid fire so we get to the Mr. Shopping Report. First question is, what, this is anonymously feedback. What happened to Tina from Benita? We don't know, and we worry about her. Tina's doing well, as far as we know, and what happened was her schedule had changed. So, you know, that sort of complicates things.

There's a few people out there that, you know, our show is quite early, and they have a conflict with their work schedule, and she did. Hello, Tina, if you're listening. Don't get in trouble. Don't know you're listening, but we miss you. More anonymous feedback. Doesn't it make sense to wait until the market calms down to buy a new or use car? Why is anyone buying now?

I plan on purchasing a new house, but it would be crazy to do so. with a car. There's no need to do something when waiting will save you thousands. I think it's a hoarding mentality. Remember what happened during the pandemic with toilet paper? You know, and the prices went up and everybody goes out and you're afraid that there aren't going to be any used cars left or there aren't going to be new cars left and the prices are going to go skyrocket higher and so far that might happen. But how long does it happen? You know, how long can you keep that old car you're driving? How long do you you want to keep it. So it's

buyer psychology and it can work against you. Maybe the best thing to do is do nothing. You know, there, you know, cars aren't like toilet paper. You've got to have toilet paper, but you don't have, if you have a serious robot catalog, you don't need toilet paper.

That shows you how old I am. But anyway, it isn't necessarily if a necessity, it's a different story. Some people can't wait. Their car breaks down, they've got to go to work. I do have a good line on a very major supply of corn husks, so I'm prepared. That's right.

I'm on a farmer either. That's a little rough. Okay, more anonymous feedback. Does the manufacturer care how low below MSRP dealers sell new cars for? Do they ever penalize dealers for selling over MSRP? No and no. The manufacturers want us to give the cars away and lose money, and they've got to whip out, And if you don't sell a certain number of cars every month, they'll take your franchise away.

There's a real adversarial relationship between the manufacturer and the dealer. And they hold all the – well, the dealers have a lot of power because of franchise laws. But specifically, the dealers that sell the cars the cheapest are the most popular, not because they're selling them cheaper because they sell more cars. every car a dealer buys from the manufacturer the manufacturer makes full list is manufacturer full list the average profit now on a new car

sold to a dealer by the manufacturer is probably about $4,000 and the average profit that a dealer's making is twice as much it used to be that's about $2,000 so the manufacturer is still making twice as much when he sells a car to the dealer and we can't negotiate with the manufacturer

and we can't negotiate price. Exactly. You don't haggle. And they have dealer fees. Yeah. They do. They put their lowest price on every car. Exactly. It's so transparent. It is transparent. We know what we're getting. All right. Next one. Anonymous feedback. What happens when you drive

your electric car into a lake? Are you and all the fish electrocuted? What about a lightning strike? Well, that caused it to short circuit. These things can't be safe. You should always wear sneakers when you're driving near the water. I know, Rick. What happens?

the car goes in the lake, does it kill all the fish? Very unlikely. No, the amount of electric charge in that battery, if it were suddenly completely immersed, it would simply dissipate through the water, and you wouldn't even feel a tingle. However, in a lightning strike, it would be just like any other car that got struck by lightning,

even a near miss. It's a stuff. It's going to cook most of the computers in the car, and odds are it's going to be totaled out by your insurance company. Okay. One last question where we'll be completed in the moment. Paul from Buffalo. I love the long distance text. Earl, how do the car companies plan to dispose of electric car batteries in the future? There's a lot of conversation about that, and they're addressing it. It's going to be a huge issue. And there are companies that are being formed today, IPOs that are going public, where they will be able to break down the batteries and basically recirculate what do you call it, recycling. the batteries by breaking them down and disposing of the components without having to bury them. Yep, so Volkswagen just finished building the first battery recycling plant in Germany.

Yeah. And they're going to do about 3,600 batteries a year starting up, and they're going to, I think, be able to recycle it 60% in the materials. What happens the other 40%? We don't know. Okay, let's move to the mystery shopping report. Mystery shopping report is of Palm Beach, Mississippi. A new Mitsubishi dealer, Obadoff, when nobody was paying attention.

I even forget the name Mitsubishi sometimes. It's hard to pronounce. Well, at least we weren't paying attention. We didn't know it. And I didn't know it. When I got the shopping report from the Cyber Spy Master Stu over there, I said, oh, I didn't know we had a new Mitsubishi be a dealer in town. When Ancient Lightning said Palm Beach Mitsubishi, I thought it was Schumacher's. Yeah.

And it wasn't. Yeah. In 2017, Mitsubishi granted an open point dealership. That means a brand new location to West Palm Beach to Christian Berrien. Chris Berrien, I know him because I hired his boat captain a long time ago. He's the owner of Coral Cadillac in Pompano Beach. In 2019, the new Bitsa Bish dealership was built on a parcel of land on the corner on the corner of Bill Deer Road and Australian Avenue. the Belvedere Road, and Australia, and I'm trying to envision that. Isn't the dog track out there somewhere? That's actually, it's going to be east of the dog track. It's right where they built that new drive shack driving range, right across the street from. Mississippi is doing very well in the United States. They only sell a little over 100,000 isn't doing very well.

They only sell a little over 100,000 new vehicles in the U.S. every year. I think the top three toilet dealers sell more than 100,000 themselves. I think Al Henderson gets close. That's minuscule, 100,000 a year. Their market share is only 0.71%, less than 1%. Toyota, to give an example, is 15%. So they're practically not here, Mitsubishi, which is actually up from 0.56% over five years ago.

They're going to better. Their sales has soared 25%. Rumors have swirled for years that Mitsubishi may pack it up and pull out of North America. If they did, nobody would notice. This didn't sound so crazy, considering I personally witnessed Lake Park Mitsubishi right near my Toyota dealership, wither, and eventually die over the last two years. The fact that they are opening new points leads me to doubt the rumors that Mitsubishi is calling quits.

And Stu wrote that. I take exception to that. I think what this dealer had Chris Berrien had in mind is he wants to, he wants to. He wants a different franchise there, and he doesn't have the... He's trying to get a Lexus, or he's trying to get a Toyota, or he's trying to get a Honda, and he hasn't been successful yet. He's lobbying for a good franchise. So he couldn't get one, so he took the Mitsubishi as a temporary thing, which is a big mistake.

He'd have been better off just to buy the land and pay the fixed cost and not have the heartache of a Mitsubishi dealership. A good point. And recently, the manufacturer introduced a new plug-in hybrid SUV. That's Mitsubishi, the outlander, the P-H-E-V, yeah, plug. Plug-in hybrid electric. Yeah, that has generated a little buzz. Perhaps Mitsubishi sees an opening in the ultimate fuel market.

I doubt that. Mitsubishi is a dead man walking, a dead manufacturer walking. Whatever the plan, Mitsubishi has a tough road to hold, their reputation for producing, Unreliable vehicles will hamper any comeback. Most of their current models have yet to be tested or are currently being tested by Consumer Reports. Why should they? Consumer reports test a car when nobody's buying it. We don't know if a workmanship and design has improved. The recent model years, however, didn't do well. Yeah, they have like really poor reliability scores. We have no idea what the sales culture was like at the Mitsubishi dealership. The last mystery shop, one of their dealership, one of their dealerships There was Lake Park Mitsubishi for Takata Airbag test. We learned that they were rowing to a solar car with a recall, but not much else about their sales desk tactics.

Agent Lightning, our female shopper, and we've been using her almost exclusively, catching out because it was years and years before we got a full-time female shopper, and she's doing a fabulous job. After she heard one of their radio ads, she found this dealership offering to double your down, payment up to $4,000. Credit amnesty, I hate that. It addresses the people with a bad credit or perceived bad credit and takes advantage. I don't like that. Credit amnesty, it's a

lie. They don't give you credit amnesty. If you had bad credit, they can't get your finance, but they want to get you in the door. And it's cruel and unusual punishment. It was not clear whether the offer meant that it was up to $4,000. or you could double the $4,000 down payment and ambiguity is the name of the game and a car dealer advertiser. We hear what we want to hear and we want to hear that if you've got a lot,

if you've got down payment, you want to hear it like, hey, if I got $4,000, they'll match it, that'll get me a $4,000 discount. And that's what you hear. The meaning is, in the eye of the beholder, we approve the emission, send agent lightning on their way. Here's the report, speaking as if I were Agent Lightning.

After hearing the radio ad for doubling down payments, I went online, found the identical offer. The online ad specified 20-20 model year vehicles, so I suspected there may not be many available for the offer. There was a contact form on the ad, so I entered my information, waited for a response. I received an email from Nicholas asking how he could help me. I replied that I was interested in the double-year-down payment promotion and asked what vehicles were available with that offer. I said I was interested in the 2020 Outlander listed for $16,711, discounted from, get this, $24,975.

Now that's a doozy of a discount. When I saw that, that can't be right. That's less, the Allender's a SUV, the 16-7-Eleven, that's cheaper than you buy a compact car for it. So, you know my standard advice, ignore all car dealer advertising, and this is why. Nicholas replied with a screenshot of seven Mitsubishi's various models, yes, these are the ones we have left. Seven, wow, that's not a bad number.

So I asked if the double deal was legit, and he confirmed it was, up to $4,000. That's clearly stated in the 80s. Clearly, I don't know about that. It was stated. Nicholas emailed me several times that day trying to set an appointment. I ignored him. I waited until the next morning I drove down to Palm Beach, Mitsubishi, Australian and Belvedere in West Palm Beach. I was approached by two men just as I climbed out of my car.

One of him introduced himself as Phil and asked how he could help. I said I was working with another salesman there named Nicholas. I said he was helping me out with a double your down payment promotion. Phil said that he didn't think Nick was there today and he'd be happy to help me. I chuckled when I say that because in car dealerships, the salesmen compete among themselves for the customers and they will, the term is skate a customer. I'm not sure skate where it came from, but they will take somebody else's customer and lie to them about, oh, that customer asked for me. I talked to him on the phone yesterday. So when you see the wolfback out on the curb,

when you pull into a dealership, they're out there trying to grab you as a customer so that the guy inside that had to get a cup of coffee and go to the bathroom, he's not going to get to talk to this customer. Even if the customer asked for him, oh, Nick is off today. That's what happens. Skid alert.

He asked the other man to excuse. I laughed and said, customers first. They both laughed and returned, and Phil said, yeah, especially the pretty ones. Creepy alert. Sorry. What's that? I said creepy alert.

Yeah. But it's kind of... He's being nice. A little inappropriate. Yeah, it could be. I mean, some people would have... Old-fashioned. ...is sexist.

Not good. Phil led me inside to the desk, and he searched his computer for the outlander I was looking for. I told him I saw it yesterday and I hoped it was still there. Phil assured me that it was still there because they didn't sell any cars yesterday. That's how we knew. There's no way that car went anywhere because we didn't sell any cars. That's so sad.

You know, part of the problem with... Don't mention how many cars we sold yesterday. Part of the problem with marginal franchises. We talked about Nissan this way. When a car dealer, when a car salesman is looking for a job and nobody will hire him, he goes to the Mitsubishi or the Nissan store. And so a bad situation made worse,

a marginal franchise cannot hire good salespeople. And it's a never-ending cycle. Exactly. And so you go into a Nissan dealership, or especially in Mississippi, you're talking to the dregs. These are the poor guy. They couldn't get hired anywhere else for whatever reason.

I was not to say they're not honest and are good people, but they couldn't get hired for whatever reason. he pulled up a 2020 outlander sport on the screen I confirmed it was the same one I saw online great Felix claimed let me get your info we'll take it for a ride after a few minutes Phil excused himself to get the key return shortly looking dejected Nick is here

or unfortunately Nick saw me and want to know what I was doing with who was that lady out there what I think because he entered some stuff in the computer and most of these customer management systems will issue a scale alert. So Nick got a notification that Phil is entering his customer in the computer. Guarantee. So I said, you're trying to escape me, you blankety blank.

And that's my customer. And so anyway, unfortunately I have to hand the keys over to you. He said Nick would be able to. I know, I like to hand you over to him. Like she was an object to be handed. Yeah, I'm sorry. He said Nick would be out in a few minutes with the keys. Nick showed up, introduced himself.

Let me outside of the outlender. He unlocked the doors. Unlocked the doors, sound of the keys to me. He asked for my driver's license, so you could take a photo copy, and I went back inside. I waited seven minutes. I don't know how Adrian Lightning is very precise. She starts the timer whenever. Every time she's made to wait, she starts her watch timer.

It's usually 15 minutes. So this is actually pretty fast. Seven minutes. When he did, he was on the phone having a conversation. Now, this is just rude. It's stupid. When you have a salesperson, the customer gets your undivoid attention. You don't talk to anybody else, especially on the phone.

He could have been talking to his girlfriend. Who knows who he was talking to. He can't afford to lose another customer there. Yeah. He put the plate on the car and continued the conversation for several more minutes while I waited by the car. So I told you. He's a terrible salesman, and that's why he's working at the Mitsubishi dealership. He finished his call.

Then we both climbed into the Outlander. Nick apologized for the phone call. I ignored the apology. Asked him why there was no window sticker on the car. And that's illegal. That's a violation. It's a federal violation. And they're very high fines and penalties.

The Monroney law, and acted in law in 1958, says you must have a window sticker on every car, the Munrooney label, and it cannot be removed until it is sold, and the customer request you to remove it, and you give the customer the copy of the Moroni label. I said, okay, where am I? Oh, he apologized, and he asked why there wasn't a window sticker on the car. He looked around, and he had no idea. He said he had no idea. Okay.

I said I wanted to see it because I wanted to confirm this was not the one. This is the same one that I looked at online. Nick opened the glove compartment, looked under the seat, looked at the back seat, he couldn't find it. So they lost them in the runway label. And that's just, let's put this way. The law is not enforced, so Nick, don't worry about it. They should police the lots. We've done that, and we found legitimate dealers with a lot of cars,

without minority labels, new cars. So the federal law is not enforced by the state regulatory agencies, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or anybody else, just like most laws in Florida are not enforced. I said I want to see to confirm blah blah He said He suggested I look at the Monroney label

Of semi-equipped 2001 model I objected and said that they were different They disagreed And they are basically the same Well that's not true I mean Fundamentally they probably are close

But you've got to see the Monroe never never buy a car Without seeing the Menroney label You could really get taken advantage of And even if they don't show it to you, verify the MSRP. That can be verified online.

We took a test drive. I asked Nick if there would be a lot of expensive fees, since they would be doubling my $4,000 down payment. Nick said it's not $4,000 they're doubling. It's $2,000 for a maximum of $4,000. Again, a lie, misrepresentation, and the advertising. Then he said they would only charge the standard fee, same as everyone else, which is BS. $998 dealership fee, dealer fee, tag, that's legit,

and something like $350 for electronic, which is another hidden fee. Two hidden fees that should have been included in the advertised price by Florida law, which is totally ignored by the Attorney General and everybody else. I asked if the price would change from the online price, since I'd be making out the down payment offer. Nick said the price would be the same, plus the fees he mentioned. We went back to the dealership, found a new desk. They could begin asking a series of increasingly personal questions.

Then he asked me how much money I made. I stopped him. I told him he needed to go see his manager. Get the numbers before I shared any more information. I also cautioned that I would not allow my credit to be run until I knew exactly what the deal was. Nick flustered if he tried to get a sales worksheet from his manager, even though he did not have the required information. I saw Nick speaking with the manager, but I couldn't hear what they were saying.

The manager looked displeased with Nick. He returned with a worksheet and a different deal than what they posted online. Before he was either, he said, apparently I was wrong about the pricing we discussed on the test drive. I'm sorry, maybe they have a different deal going on, or maybe I've just got it wrong.

He seemed ashamed. The sale of price was $18, $9.61, $2,000, $2,000 higher than the Internet. price bait and switch blatant illegal nauseating that they would do this they added 550 for registration 998 document fee BS 397 electronic fee hidden fees my $2,000 payment was listed as a deposit not a down payment as a deposit what can I say I that that's totally illegal. That's a total

lie, blatant lie. Yeah, you definitely got it wrong. I said that point to the bottom line, and that's why they hadn't shown that my down payment was being doubled. Nick said, he'd be right back, and he left to get another forum. He said, this was the form I'd fell out an F&I that addressed the

doubling in my down payment. So, they're hiding everything until you get into the box into the F&I department. So this is the most deception I've seen in a long time. I looked at Nick said I could tell him tell he was having a hard time.

I read, I said this whole experience was not sitting well with me. I said it was because everything was my husband, but I probably wouldn't be coming back. Now, we don't have to wonder what the sale experience is like in the Mitsubishi dealership. Well, the ambiguous offer

doubling down was intentional or not. It was definitely it was intentional. It was devilishly clever. And here we are. I mean, this is the worst shopping I've seen in a long time. Fortunately, Mitsubishi doesn't sell any cars. Has no impact on our community.

Right. Right. I mean, if you have to have, I would much rather have a crooked dealer that doesn't sell any cars, that a crooked dealer that sells a huge amount of cars. And unfortunately, there are a lot of crooked dealers that sell a huge amount of cars. That's usually the case. The more crooked you are sometimes that helps sales.

We have grades coming in, Linda, gives them a big, it gets them a fad, a rude salesperson, person. And then text coming in. We just have two from Jonathan in Wellington. He says, hmm, new dealership, same old car sales tricks, law breaking and lies. And if the salespeople will cheat each other, they'll cheat the customer too. I'll give them an F. And then Bob, it would have been an F minus, but with Grading Amnesty. With Grading Amnesty, it's just an F. It's like credit amicacy, but it's grading amsy. And Amory says, congratulations. They win the bottom of the barrel award for the week. They've earned

an F for bait and switch, losing my running label, lying, et cetera. And I'm not going to be as cruel. I'm going to give them a D because even though it was kind of egregious, I think it's in line with some of the common behavior out there. So I'll give them a D.

Oh, God. D minus. Brooke? Yeah, I've got Alva Thompson saying, not looking good, so I'm going to call that one a fail. Mark from St. Louis with an F minus. Let's see, Donovan, total F, really bad experience. Tim Gilliland, a ginormous F.

Tom, F, F, F, Todd, Logan, it's a long drive out to left field, going, going foul, F. Mark Smith with an F, John, with a big F, Mark Ryan with an F, Wayne with an F, and Ernesto with an F. He got who's on fire today. Can it get any worse, Nancy? Can it get any worse? I like that. I like that ever. advertisement you didn't spot you don't see that very often i'm going to give them a disgusting f well congratulations chris perian on your new dealership and uh i guess you don't you knew you were going to sell any cars anyway and we're going to put you on the not just the don't recommend

we're going to say ought to be in jail list well you know uh this is their inaugural appearance on Good Dealer, Baddealerlist.com. It's not an auspicious event, but there you are. Your name will be on lights with a big Fed-F. Yeah. Okay. After this, all cars and shops will look good. We are out of time, and we are ready to get out of here.

Thank you so much, everyone, for tuning in to Earl Stewart on cars. We'll see you next week. Bye, bye. Vendom to me. Vendom to me. Bento. Bento. Oh, no.

No. No. Oh. No.