Earl Stewart on Cars - 06.20.2020 - Your Calls, Texts, and Mystery Shop of Coggin Honda - Fort Pierce

Episode Date: June 20, 2020

Earl answers various caller questions and responds to incoming text messages. Agent Thunder visits Coggin Honda in Fort Pierce, to see if he can purchase a low mileage 2012 Honda Accord to see if he can get the "out the door" price as advertised on their website. Earl Stewart is the owner of Earl Stewart Toyota in North Palm Beach, Florida, one of the largest Toyota dealerships in the southeastern U.S. He is also a consumer advocate who shares his knowledge spanning 50+ years about the car industry through a weekly newspaper column and radio show. Each week Earl provides his audience with valuable tips that prevent them from "getting ripped off by a car dealer". Earl has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, Business Week, and other major publications. He has also made numerous appearances on CNN, Fox News, CBS, and other news networks. He is frequently called upon by local and national media to comment on major trends and newsworthy events occurring in today’s rapidly changing auto industry. You can learn more by going to Earl's videos on www.youtube.com/earloncars, subscribing to his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/earloncars, his tweets at www.twitter.com/earloncars, and reading his blog posts at www.earloncars.com. “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 self-forwarded dealership. And now, on with the show. Good morning, everybody.

Well, we're back live. You're listening to recording on my voice. My name is Earl. I'm a recovering car dealer, and I've been doing this for 17 years on the radio. For you newbies out there, this is something you have never heard or seen before, because we're streaming it as well. And I'm not going to reintroduce everybody here because you just heard it on the recording. But I'm going to tell you about our mystery shopping report again, because if you have never listened to the show or rarely maybe forgot about it, our mystery shopping report is something to behold.

It's kind of like keeping all the car dealers in the area. and for that matter, now that we're international, all over, keeping them honest, transparent. We go into a car dealership somewhere in Florida. I say south Florida, but we have ventured north quite a distance. I've been all the way up to Pensacola, Florida. We even get phone in and mystery shopping reports from other areas of the country. But every week, somewhere, usually in Florida,

we're visiting a car dealership pretending to buy or lease a car. We're also going to be going into pretending to service a car because the service department can also be a minefield when you go in there to be taken advantage of. One other thing I have to say before I go around the room and let everybody introduce themselves is we are not trying to we're not trying to embarrass car dealerships.

We're not trying to be the bad guy to attack and tell people how to do their business. What we're trying to do is let them know that if they change their ways, they can actually sell cars the right way with transparency and honesty. And the other point I want to make is that we're not just doing this on a hunch.

I have to mention this Gallup Annual Poll on Honesty and Ethics and Professions. You can Google it. Just go to Google and put in Gallup, Poll, Honesty, and Ethics. ethics and professions or just probably honesty and ethics Gallup poll. Since 1977, the Gallup organization, the most respected worldwide polling organization, has asked people all over the world, the United States primarily, which businesses that you deal with are the most honest and ethical.

And when they do this, they've been doing it for 40-some-odd years, car dealers are always on the bottom. Now, most of you know that, some of you don't. A lot of car dealers don't know that. That's why we're here. So we've got a team in this room at the studio, the radio studio. As I say, we're streaming on Facebook, Twitter. We're on YouTube.

YouTube is really big. And I think we even had one from, what was the one we had that we hadn't seen in a long time? Periscope. Periscope. I forgot the name. It's not very popular. There used to be, it came on, but we actually had a periscope. So we're streaming all over the place, and you can tune us in here right at the radio show,

or you could just go to stream, earloncars.com. So I'm going to go around the room. I'm going to start to my left with Nancy Stewart. She's my co-host. She's my wife. She started this radio show with me 17 years ago when we're only a half an hour, and she's very special because she has made this a co-house. co-ed show. We started out as an old

boys club. Earl Stewart on cars and all the guys called in and with Nancy's persistence and leadership we now have a very significant female audience and let's face it, the world sees things differently through female eyes

or female sees the world differently through their eyes and men do and that's just the way it is and if they're half the population they should have half to say so. Nancy it's all yours. Good morning everyone. and welcome to another exciting show. We're here to inform you, and we certainly want you to inform us.

So take advantage of that toll-free number and give us a call at 877-960-99-60, or you can text us at 772-497-6530. And as Earl said, I do represent all of you, but I do especially represent the women because there are times whenever their voice is not heard and it doesn't certainly doesn't happen as often as it used to but I'm still here to represent the ones who aren't heard that I hear from throughout the week

and also to let you know that the first two female callers can win themselves $50 this morning. Yes, the first two new lady callers can win themselves $50. So give us a call with a comment, a question, anything at all. And don't forget that you can also go to Your Anonymous Feedback.com and you can voice whatever you want right there. And we'll read it and we'll read it on the air. So again, that number, 877, 960, 9960.

Don't forget, we have a great mystery shopping report. Now back to the recovering car dealer. And by the way, writing on that, we need you to call. It's amazing the information we get. We've got some very smart folks out there all over the country. And there's not a week that goes by that all of us learn something from you. So it's not a, you know, we're not up here as professors are teaching you what to do. we're learning from you.

And I'm not just saying that to make you feel good. It's really true. I want to introduce my son, Stu Stewart. I've already introduced him in the recording introduction. And Stu has got probably his most important job is the spy master. So Stu just tell us a little bit about that and what's going to happen. Yeah, I just want to reiterate what you said about us not being like the teachers are up here in like a lecturing sort of role. Because we Google half the things you ask us anyway.

Yeah, we don't need us. We got Google. Anyway, no, I was just thinking to myself as we did. I haven't counted the number of mystery shopping reports over the years. And, you know, there's more than, there's more mystery shopping reports than we have posted on Erlon cars because we started saving those things, gosh, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago or eight years. I'll have to count them. Prior to that, they were just printed on pieces of paper.

You brought them to the studio, and they're probably long gone. They're in the desk door at your house. something I don't know but I was just thinking see there's the sheer amount of data that we've collected I mean that all those reports somebody and don't look at me don't assign me to do this come up with a massive study on car dealer behavior statistics I mean there's enough data in there the evolution of that behavior yeah you can you could you could you know track that sort of behavior over time you can see if it changed you can see trends not any I don't think anybody knows this I have a background in social science I

a degree in anthropology from University of Florida and it kind of reminds me of field work. Not exactly. I mean, I don't want any anthropologist calling to tell me that's not really field work, but when we send an agent out into the field, it's kind of similar to social science work, and so you go there, collect a lot of data. We know that we influence the results because we're interacting with the subjects, but it's still an amazing amount of data, and one day we'll do something with it. Yeah. But anyway, this week was just crazy, and I don't want to over-tease it, you know, and build it up too much, but we stumbled on something really, really weird this week. I mean, something that I, you know, for a moment I thought, was that put

up there for our benefit? Was it bait? Well, you've been in the business for 20-some-odd years. I've been in the business for 50-some-odd years, and you think we saw everything. But every now and then, as Stu just said, you see something, you say, I can't believe they're doing this. Yeah. But usually the craziest things that we find are sent to us by listeners. friends, people, they know that we'll be interested. We just, this was pure luck. We just went to a website, started looking around, and then we found something really weird.

So stay tuned. It's going to be great. Very good. Okay, to my right is Rick Kearney. He's a certified diagnostic master technician. And I'll be the first one to admit that we focus too much on car sales. We talk about particularly new car sales and then use car sales. and we tend to forget.

We don't mystery shop enough dealerships on service, and we should. It's a problem throughout all car dealerships. I am a car dealership. I am a car dealer. I own a car dealership. And to give you full transparency disclosure, this is not an infomercial. I always have to follow that up by saying I don't try to advertise our car dealership. This is truly a consumer advocate show.

But in my car dealership, we tend to over-emphasize new. car sales. They're the salespeople. They get all the credit and even my used car salespeople feel discriminated against because we don't talk about it. And I know my service people feel that because we talk, talk, talk car sales. There's some logic to that because the more cars we sell, the more cars come in for service. But guys like Rick Kearney here are the unsung heroes of all car dealerships. Rick is here to help you with your problems, with your complicated computerized cars. And he's the best of the best.

I've been with me for well over 20 years. And I don't know another technician. I should call him a computer scientist that knows more about it. Rick, tell us a little bit about what you do. 25 years turning wrenches professionally. And I started out learning how to work on my own stuff just for necessity. And I fell in love with the idea of finding

and solving the problems on cars. And as they've gotten more and more complicated, it just makes it more of a challenge and a little more fun. And I'm going to take the opportunity to tell George Mogul from YouTube, because we monitor our YouTube, and we get a lot of questions here. George is saying, I have a 2010 Scion TC, and 115,000 miles isn't a good idea to flush the automatic transmission. And the answer is, George, not really. Toyota has specified that our transmission fluids are meant for the life of the car for most modern cars. Unless you're having a problem with the transmission, which should be diagnosed then by a good reputable transmission shop or a dealership, I see no reason to flush the transmission.

If it's running normally, leave it alone. In your glove compartment, you usually will find a book for every single car that is your factory, recommended maintenance. And if it doesn't say it in that factory recommended maintenance, then you won't need it. Yeah, I'm as guilty as anybody. I don't read owner's manuals. I don't read instructions. I get something in a box that needs to be assembled.

I usually mess it up, and then I go find the instructions so I can unmiss it up. We're all guilty of that. And if you don't listen to anything else we say today, get your owner's manual of your car. You can't find it. You can buy one from the dealer. You can probably buy them online. Actually, you can find them online for free. You can download it.

You can print it out. Yeah, exactly. Read the maintenance requirements and read as much as you can. The problem with the manufacturers today is they get carried away in their owner manual. I have an owner manual. I drive a Lexus, and I have an owner's manual that looks like Encyclopedia Britannica. In fact, it's so big and so heavy. It's in two different areas.

up all the space in my glove compartment. So you see that and when you buy the car, you say, I can't read that and you put it away and you never see it again. But in there there's a quick reference guide, I think, and go in there, read the quick reference guide and read the recommended maintenance. Yep. And so. And one other quick one for you, if you happen to have something in your car, because you drive a very complicated vehicle with a lot of controls and you're not always sure what they all do, what they're for.

Grab your cell phone, sit in your car, and pull up a YouTube and look for the YouTube videos that tell you how to work those controls. There's hundreds of them out there, a lot of great people that will give you the advice

to tell you how to work those complicated controls and show you, so while you're sitting in the car, you can sit and play with it while it's showing it on your phone. Let me ask you a question, are the more intelligent, efficient, useful YouTube's in order? In other words, when I do this sometimes, I don't do it enough, and I go on a particular subject,

is the YouTube person on the top, is generally that the best, or you go down? Usually they're the one with the most likes and the most good reviews, which means people have found that information helpful. I thought so. So, like I say, also, if you find that helpful, give that person a like on their channel. Absolutely. Well, folks, I'm going to interrupt you guys, and I'm going to tell everyone, stick around because Rick has got some amazing knowledge. He definitely does, and he'll answer any of your questions. But right now, we are going to go to the star of all stars, and that is Tina from Benita Springs. Good morning, Tina, and welcome. Where you been? Good morning. Good morning. How are you doing? Actually, I tried to call you.

on last week and I couldn't call in because y'all are busy and that actually makes me happy that you have people calling in lots of people so I was like well you know everybody gets to break from here and me flap my app so I guess that was kind of good in a way

yeah yeah we need a more robust phone system I think they can only handle so much on the station I think four or five calls yeah yeah what's up Tina yeah but still it was it was good well Rick I wanted to turn my

attention to you because Florida has some unique situations regarding tires. We are not like other parts of the country that are to snow belt. So for people that are needing to buy tires, I was wondering if you had any advice for those of us that live in Florida. My recommendation is to look for the highest quality tires you can afford. And consumer reports is a great way to get good information on what the best tires are, the highest quality, the longest tread wear ratings. And I would absolutely get the best quality tires you can afford. We do have better roads condition-wise than some of the other places in the country. But right now we're going into a rainy season and we've got hurricane season possibly coming. Roads are going to be wet and slick

all the time. Folks, good tires are what keeps your car on the road. And, Daniel, let me add there. Costco was a great source of tires. The prices are extremely competitive. Costco carries nothing but quality brand tires. But as Rick said, you can double-check that with consume reports.org and verify. But you get a great price and you even have a, they actually have service departments there too. You can do basic maintenance at Costco. And if you're lucky enough to have one in your area, and Sam's Club probably has the same thing.

I know they mount in balance tires. I don't know if they do other services or not. Okay, Dana. Well, what I was wondering, Rick, is there a particular brand that you really have an affinity for that you think is reliable and that you like personally? I got to admit, I have two brands that I prefer overall. One is Michelin, of course,

because Michelin simply is the top quality bar none. And the other brand that I like the best for my vehicles is Toyo. I've had really good luck with Toyo tires on my cars. I drive a Tacoma pickup, and the set of Toyos that I've had on there now have been on for about 50,000 miles, and I've still got a ton of tread left on them. And tend to be careful about brands because brands are important, but the more money is spent on a brand, the more aware you are of a brand.

Mishlin, Firestone, a lot of these, when you say name a tire, you're going to say Michelin or Firestone or Goodyear because they spend so much money. There are some excellent tires out there. Very few people probably have heard of Toyo. There's some Chinese tires out there, and I don't want to get political about this. I know some people won't buy anything unless it's made in America. What they don't know is a lot of these tires that are made that have American names are made somewhere else, but that's another show.

But Consumer Reports list all of them, and if they have never heard of a tire and consumer reports of the name, the brand, Consumer Report says it's a good tire, you can count on it. And as I say, Chinese and Japanese tires often are more competitive. Because Michelin and Firestone, the will wear brands, they take advantage of the fact that you know their brand, and they charge you more for the tire. I had a set on my beloved Miata. I had a set of Toyot T1S tires. Those things were the absolute best. Since they were a sporty tire, they only last 15,000 miles, but they were a very happy 15,000 miles.

I can tell you that. Interesting. And you know, Tina, consumer report, boy, I'll tell you what, you can't go wrong. They've got some trusted ratings on tires. Tires that I haven't even heard of, as Earl mentioned just a bit ago. But the consumer report, like I said, you definitely can't go wrong. They just rate these tires, use the tires, test the tires. It's amazing.

Yes, but now we've got the official Rick recommendation for tire brands to look for. Well, you're right about that, Tina, most definitely. He has some amazing knowledge about everything under the hood, he's tired everything. He's just one in a million. Yeah, they're going to make me blush. And it's all free, Tina. The information that you hear on this show is free.

Is that amazing? Yes, it is. And ladies, before I go, Nancy and I cannot do this by ourselves we need you to call in so ladies please call Tina thank you so much I really appreciate you know the plug and there are a lot of ladies out there Tina that aren't like you and we'll just pick up the phone and give us a call they're a little bit bashful so thank you for the plug and ladies the first two new lady callers you can win yourself $50 don't forget

$50 for the first two new lady callers. And that telephone number, 877-960-99-60, or you can text us at 772-497-6530. And again, Tina, thank you. Now back to the recovering car dealer. Okay, don't forget your anonymousfeedback.com. We really get a lot of people take advantage of that. It's a unique website you go to, and you can communicate to us.

You can say anything you want. You can call me bad names. You can call Nancy bad names. Can't call Stu. He doesn't like that. But the point being, I'm only kidding, you can say whatever you want. We don't know who you are.

A lot of people opt for that. Some people say, you know, I'm not afraid to speak up, but a lot of people just don't want the spotlight. Your anonymous Feedback.com. Y-O-U-R-A-N-O-N-Y-M-O-U-S feedback.com. What an excellent segue to some anonymous feedback. Okay, let's do it. All right. How the phone line's looking? Okay. Great. Good. All right. This is a critic, yeah? Sorry. That's all right. Hey.

Line just lit up. We're going to go to Joe. Good morning, Joe. Joe's calling us. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome. Thank you. Good morning, Gabe. My first time talking on on the show. How are you? Oh, fantastic. Great. I have a question regarding online car buying, which is becoming increasingly more popular, especially now that we've all been cooped up for three and a half months. But my first question is with the maintenance side and had an experience here. Broke quarantine, drove to see my kids in Atlanta last week, drove back and fought 600 miles each way, came back, parked my Mercedes SL 550 on the driveway, unloaded it, went out the next morning. The car was stuck in gear.

could not move it. Warning light comes on. Do not shift gears, visit dealership. Could not get the car, bypass the transmission sensor. The tow truck guys came from Gardens Cowing. Great guys. A shout out for them. They tried.

Two guys came out. We finally had to get the car up on the lift and bring it to the mechanics. But what's with those electronic transmissions and these sensors? Rick? like any mechanical thing sometimes things break so we i mean we that's why cars have warranty because sometimes they break very early but it can happen i've seen transmissions fail very easily and sometimes it's just a when they were manufacturing it a little piece of metal got caught in a solenoid or something it may have even been floating around in the fluid for a while

and then finally got caught in a solenoid to jam it up. But without knowing a full diagnosis, it's a little hard to really describe what's going on. But basically, transmissions now have reached the point where when we first started having automatic transmissions, they had two or even three speeds in them. Now you've got transmissions with up to 12 gears, 12 different speeds, that that transmission can handle. And the continuously variable transmissions basically have an infinite range of rates.

ratios that they could produce. Joe, what year Mercedes did you say that was? It's at 2013. It had 22,000 miles on it. 1,200 great miles driving the car, and boom, just stopped. Yeah. That's on my driveway and not on I-95. I just Googled the SL 550. In 2007 had chronic problems.

I don't see the 2013 listed there, but you could probably go online and find some other chat rooms where they give you some information on this. And of course, the other thing that you want to do when the dealer has it in their hands, be sure that they're, find out

if there are any technical repair bulletins. They call them, you know, TRB, a technical repair bulletin. Also, there could even be a recall of some kind. But be sure, oftentimes dealerships, they should be, but they're not aware of all the

technical repair buildings and if they look they can access it online and that means that they'll take care of it for you at no charge so Rick go ahead also a car with that low of miles and that age I mean seven years yeah but still I'd be

asking them about the possibility of goodwill assistance on the warranty good point yeah goodwill is something that people don't know about because the dealers don't talk about it manufacturers don't talk about it but if you put your foot down, as Rick says, when you have a low mileage situation or even time-wise, it can be out

of warranty, but if it's low mileage or it could be higher mileage and it's within the time on the warranty, usually when you're close like that to the warranty and you put your foot down, sometimes you have to call the 800 number to Mercedes or whoever the manufacturer is, go to the top in the dealership, talk to the service manager, or if you can get to the dealer himself, the owner, do that, and say, this isn't right. I know technically on out of warranty, but the car's only got low mileage on it. Shouldn't have happened. Can you get me some help on this?

If they diagnose it, call the manufacturer Mercedes. Oftentimes, at our dealership, experience-wise, I'd say, what would you say to, 75% of the time or better, we're able to get some assistance? Oh, yeah. It just takes effort and interest, that's all. Yeah. So try that tactic instead of having to shell out a lot of money, which sounds like it might be an expensive proposition. It's a mortgage payment. Thank you. That's great. Really? My other question brings us to new car sales, which I'm sure the dealers are floated with inventory right now. How do you look at

this online experience and how that's changing the landscape for folks? I know walking into your dealership is an experience different from many others, but across the country, dealerships are adapting to online sales and percentages is tipping what what what recommendations do you have for the shoppers the buyers on how to approach online buying yeah stu's in the trenches on this and he's a count more or less um runs our whole online buying thing so he can answer that question very well right so uh online buying or online retailing is a is a buzzword in the car business right now the manufacturers are pushing it and the reason for it and it's been pushing it for a couple of years now the reason for is it's the

recognition of the changing economy you know the transitioning from brick and mortar stores to on time online car dealers don't want to do this the old school model is still the dominant model in most car dealerships and they want to get you in the dealership set an appointment and then apply the traditional sales tactics. I can speak for Toyota. Toyota's been pushing an online retail functionality for dealerships for about two or three years now. Prior to that, and we got into it about in 2017, and our goal was to actually have like a real, just like Amazon, you click a few buttons online, and the car shows up. Yeah, click to buy. Now, all that resistance by the car dealers kind of crumbled in the last couple of months because we had this pandemic.

And so everybody said, well, gosh, thanks for letting me know. They all signed up with these online retailing platforms. So that's the history. The advice that I could give is you'll figure out really, really quickly whether or not it's a real online experience. I mean, the first thing you look for is can you find the out-the-door price, the actual the price you'd write a check for right there on the website. If that's not visible or you have to speak to somebody about it, it's not really. online buying. When you're buying something on Amazon, you don't got to talk to a customer

service representative who will then suggest that you show up to the Amazon fulfillment center and discuss the price. I mean, you'll figure it out soon, but I'm going to say that unfortunately, the vast majority, and I'm going to say in the upper 90% majority, does not offer true online retailing. There are some, I mean, like we said, it's not an infomercial. So our dealership does. And there are a few that I know that do. They're not in Florida. So you've got to be careful.

But it's easy to figure out because the second you can't get all the information and need right there on the website, and you'll figure it out. The other thing is delivery. Talk about the inventory. We want to be sure we'll clear up the inventory. Yeah, it might seem because business had slowed down that inventories would be bloated. that is not the case at all. I'm anticipating this.

All the manufacturers shut down production back in March and April for a large period of time. Inventories are at historical lows right now. And that's why you're going to start to see, yeah, you're going to start to see incentives go down as it becomes harder and harder to get cars. Getting the color you want, getting the equipment you want, it's going to get harder and harder. And it's not going to, for Toyota, it's not going to start getting better until August. and I imagine it's probably an even tougher situation with the domestic manufacturers

good information and I think you're right people are going online expecting that really good quick experience like an Amazon like you said and then getting you know oh you have to email it in and then you find to get a call or

back from five different salespeople from the same dealership and then you still didn't get you still don't get a price. Yeah. Well, even at our dealership, we started in July 2017, and it's only been like a handful of a month over the last three years that people actually did that.

And I think it's, you know, the market's trained. You know, it's, and they're probably rightfully skeptical about, even our claims. Yeah, sure. But after the pandemic hit, that changed, and we started doing about 15% of our sales online with home delivery. So it's still a small fraction of our total sales, but it's definitely picking up. Great.

Well, terrific. Thanks, everybody, and have a great rest of the weekend. Thank you, Joe. Thank you, Joe. Thank you for tuning in and giving us a call for the first time. Hope to hear from you next week. Ladies and gentlemen, that phone number toll-free is 877-960-960, and the text is 772-497-6530. And don't forget, ladies, we're right here for you to answer your questions.

And please don't be bashful. Give us a call. I'll give you a little incentive. You can win yourself $50 this morning. First two new lady callers, you can win yourself $50. Ladies, did you know that you influence this overall buying decision by 85%? and you purchase, purchase most of the cars. That's 65%.

And if you go through the service drive, you'll find it to be more than 50% of the women who are getting their cars or their family's cars serviced. So please, you're an important part of the show. Give us a call. Now back to Stu. We have anonymous feedback, and it is a critique.

Response to your blog, car dealerships, endangering customers. I could not have said this better myself. This is an excerpt from Martha Ross's, this is an excerpt from Martha Ross's article posted on the medical press, quote, but experts say it doesn't help to let fear turn people

into self-righteous social vigilantes. Shaming people online or in public can be counterproductive if the goal is to change behavior and pull everyone together in a time of national. crisis. Here's where the etiquette comes in. Emily Post once said that considering the rights and feelings of others is the very foundation upon which social life is built. Simon Thomas added etiquette is a way for people to get along in situations that are ambiguous, which is what we find ourselves in now. You are one of those shamers. You conduct your affairs with the perfect example

of being for others, but you also put them down. And those other dealers are, are not wanting to work with you, but rather against you now. It's a typical psychology to fight against what hurts you and publicly criticize you. Lead by example in a helping hand to raise up those dealer standards may work better than the hammer to beat them down. And here's the link for your reading pleasure. It's a link to the Emily Post stuff. But I know you're anxious, you're chomping in a bit to address that. I responded to it to the anonymous feedback.

Do you have the anonymous feedback response? No, no, I can't see that. Well, I'll summarize it. First of all, I said it was very intelligent and articulate statement. I agree with a lot of things that the anonymous feedback said. Generally speaking, it's not a good idea to shame people. And she mentioned Emily Post and some other people. You know, on a personal basis, I would never resort to that.

But the reason I resort to what I do with car dealers is that car dealers have one thing on their mind and they're business people. And all business people have number one focus for a business person is what? It's profit. And you want to sell a lot of the product. You want to have a higher margin and you want the bottom line to be there. And everybody that is in business, the retail business, especially, their number one motivator is profit. So by shaming those dealers or exposing those dealers that don't enforce and regulate their salespeople to wear face masks, by exposing them, they are hurting their bottom line.

Most of you out there, if you know that this Chevrolet dealership that you go into, everybody in there is wearing a face mask. They have hand cleanser, they have social distancing, they have sneeze shields. extra care for the employees and their customers we have another Chevrolet dealership where nobody wears a mask there's no hand sanitizer and they don't even require their customers to wear a mask or ask them which are those two Chevrolet dealerships will you go in to first and you may never go into the other one we know you know the answer so car dealers listen to this radio show religiously word spreads fast in this business and I promise you that as a result

of us shaming and embarrassing these car dealers that are so careless and unconcerned about their customers and their employees to tell them or not tell them they must wear face mask, these same car dealers will change their policy and I'm gonna go out of the limb, I'd say, two weeks from now, when we go out and shop and mystery shop, we will find most car dealers doing it the other way.

Two-thirds of the dealers we shopped up until a week ago did not require any face mask. A month from now, two-thirds will, and eventually we'll probably see close to 90%. So that's my answer. And also just to tag on to that, to be effective, I do understand the point. Set the example and others will follow. And without bragging, we have been setting the example, and then the real-world experiences, it hasn't been followed to this point. Well, and we'll pat ourselves on the back.

We're selling a lot of cars. We're selling more cars today, relatively speaking, than any other dealer in our market. And we are also one of the dealers that has taken extra precautions to be very careful. We require any customer that comes into our dealership, they must wear a face mask. And we provide a face mask if they don't have one. And we do all the rest of it with a hand sanitizing. the Sneezeer, the Sneeze, the Social Spacing, and our employees and everybody. So we're very careful. People are, your car deals listening to this, you try the same thing,

and you'll sell more cars, too. I'm not trying to taunt you or embarrass you. I'm trying to get you to act smart to help you sell more cars. Rick? Mr. Hand is asking, please ask that person to explain this ambiguity he or she mentions. What shaming is there in exposing non-carriage? dealers you know it's so you know I I agree with that and I I think that there is a time and place for shaming and it's usually and turn the mr. shopping report it's it but in general leading by example if I have children and I didn't have children one of the one of my children is sitting

right across from me and if I had been a better daddy I probably I'm sure I shamed you Stu and I apologize I did nothing worthy of shame. If I had been wiser, a wiser father, I would have led by example, and I would have coached and tried to explain things better. Shaming a child is not a good idea. I'm taking it all out on the cartilers now. Now I'm taking it a lot of.

That's pretty weird, isn't it? You're a car dealer, and now I lash out of a cardiologist. There's some psychological stuff going on there. Okay. But yeah, and also procuring masks and other safety equipment It's become like a full-time job. I mean, we're spending thousands of dollars en masse. We're going all over the world looking for places.

Yeah, it's a little, I wish it wasn't this way. I mean, I wish we could focus on the other stuff. But, yeah, it is important. We set an example here. That's all we want to do. And we're not here to shame anybody, but just set an example. Our phone number is 8779-9-60, and, of course, you can text us at 7-17. 4976530. And don't forget your anonymous feedback.com. And we are going to go to one of our

favorite callers from Palm City, and that is John. Thank you so much for holding, John, and welcome to the show. Good morning. Good morning to everyone. I'm proud of Tina bringing up about the fact a woman buying tires. Here's the wonderful story that Nancy would be proud of. On Thursday, I spoke to a woman. He lost the husband last August. He used to handle everything with the automobiles. He left her with two cars. She's keeping one in honor of him. It's a 60.

It's Havrear Chevalet. I think they bought it new. So she needed tires for her modern car. She knew what she wanted from Consumer Reports. She went to a multi-brand tire dealership. Pretending she doesn't really know much. She said, listen,

I want to be educated in every one of those symbols. You have a tire on the floor. Or what all those symbols mean? I want you to go over it with me, please. You know, in other words, this is the temperature. This is the size. And he had a chart, which he copied and gave her. Wonderful, wonderful chart. She gave me a copy. I think it was put out by good year. And he won over actual, every item, the DOT, all the symbols on the tire. And then she even educated me more from the symbol she gave me. She gave me that there's three different size tires,

numeric, alpha-medic, and p-metric. Well, the merrick is, like a 60-car would be. They used that from the 20s to the 60s. That's like a 7, 10, 15. It's the width. I won't go with the other detail. The alphromatic is an F-series, and then the P-metric, which is what we use now,

is the latest. It's confusing, but it all explains it. And she was honored to get that actual printout from them, so she knew right away she knew the date on the tire and everything and she just was it was a wonderful experience but this is why a woman goes in and it really doesn't know anything and winds up with an actual chart from the tire dealer who was more than honest with her and she did wind up buying the tire that she knew she wanted because she saw it in consumer reports what a great story john I really appreciate you sharing that with us because unfortunately there are some women out there

that are left with a job because they've lost their significant other who did everything. And there they are and they just don't know in what direction to turn. And this lady was savvy enough to remedy the problem and she's prepared and knowledge, as I always say, is power. Great story, John. I'm very proud of her. Yes, indeed.

A lot of women listening right now are definitely proud of her. And happy Father's Day to the Fathers that are out there. Oh, thank you very much. Thank you very much. That's great. Happy Father's Day to you, too, John. Okay, the kudos to Goodyear, by the way. You hear that Firestone?

You hear that, Michelin? I bet you Costco does something like that. But what a cool idea of having a chart. that translates all the garbage on the side of the tire that was probably decided by the federal government. The way they encode things like the date is no rhyme nor reason. You really need a code book.

And so Goodyear has come out with a code book. And I hope all the tire manufacturers deal. I'm going to get a copy of that chart. You know what I'd like to see? Have you ever seen on the Google Translate app that translates different languages and they use the camera? And it sees that it actually reads the text.

it's OCR optical recognition. They should have a program where you should point your phone at the tire, it reads the symbols, and translates it to English. Absolutely. Great idea, Stu. You're going to be a rich man. You better patting up. I'm on record, so.

Rick has a point on that subject right here. Something that I saw once when I was a kid. My dad, we went into a tire kingdom to get new tires on his car, and they had this little wooden model car that had adjustable parts for, camber, caster, and toe, so the guy could actually take this little car and set it in front of you and explain all the ways

of an alignment adjustments on your car by showing you on this little model. And I thought that was so cool. I think I had to reinvent one of those. Yeah, absolutely. That was an awesome idea. I learned how a modery, monster rotary engine work from a model that used to have on your desk.

Yeah, exactly. That's the extent of my engine knowledge. I mean, it's so complicated to take a look at the side of your tire. I'm sitting, you know, in front of my tire on the floor, and I'm holding my head. Why is there so much information on the side of that tower that nobody understands? Okay, how are we doing on text? I got plenty. I'm sure Rick's got some, too.

Let's answer some questions. I got one quick one here. Kyle's asking, are Toyota dealers not doing inventory trades because of the inventory issue right now? They are doing inventory trade. They're doing a lot of them, probably more than ever. It's a little hard to, it's like a negotiation. because there are certain models that are very, very short supply, certain models that are not so short,

and so it's a matter of negotiation. But I have an excellent point to make, if I do say so myself. A lot of dealerships, it's a no-no to do a locate, in other words to trade for another vehicle. They want to sell what they have in stock. They want to do a spot delivery. They want to get you excited about the car that you drove, and they want to get you in the box quickly and get you on the road.

So it runs counter to the culture, in a lot of dealerships to do what we call them locates but their dealer transfers or trades and they charge sometimes they gig the salesman's commission or they charge the customer for the trade they do whatever they can to disincentivize that now when push comes the shove i think if they're going to lose a deal they're going to do that like a guy it's it's hard not to i'm just going to say like you know we're used to doing that um we've done dealer trades we get criticized for the the number of trades that we do we criticize ourselves because we could probably do a better job selling from stock but so the dealers that are now in this new reality of like extremely extremely

stressed inventory levels um they're doing something they don't want to do so there's going to be a harder push at a lot of dealerships to get you into the blue car when you wanted the white car so you might get a good deal they might say hey if you take the blue car we have here we'll take another 500 off but it just it just adds another complication to an already complicated situation. Okay, oh, the lines are lit up, and we are going to go to another regular caller, and that's Howard. Thank you for holding, Howard. Good morning. My pleasure. Happy Father's Day to you all. Thanks, Howard. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, great. I have a couple of questions for Rick. Rick, I had a 1970 Plymouth Valiantz, and I had the slant six engine. I think that was the

best engine, American engine ever made. Do you agree with me? No. I always liked the old Chevy 350. It was... For a six-cylilner? For six-cylilners, yeah,

Slash-6 was a pretty good engine. I mean, basically, any of the old 70s, muscle cars, you know, they would handle their own even with the six, but myself, it was at Chevy 350. Okay, that's a classic. Okay, a question about

oil. I have oil in plastic bottles. Is there an expiration date on oil? No, no. I mean, it's been on the ground for millions of years. I think another couple of months isn't going to hurt it.

Nah, yeah. As long as you're keeping it tightly sealed and it's not like leaking out of the bottle, it's going to be fine. Okay. Another thing, very disappointing about America, can cause. There's a recall on Jeeps. And this was an old thing that was happening many years

ago when you put your transmission in park, it would go in reverse or it would go in neutral and the car was withdrawal. That's happening now with Jeeps. Now, I wonder why don't get their act together? What is wrong with Jeeps as far as, you know, getting their act together and producing a real good American car. What do you think about that, Rick? I really couldn't tell you, but if I had to guess, I would say it's the almighty dollar. Jeeps are going to sell because people,

there's a huge following for jeeps that love them. So those people are going to buy jeeps no matter what. And as long as they're still buying them, the parent company is going to cut costs as much as they can to make as much money as they can off of those vehicles, and they're going to sit back and enjoy it. You know, my two cents worth, Rick, knows more than I, but I think if you look at the evolution of the Jeep,

of course, the Jeep was a 1940s vehicle. It was designed for the U.S. Army. Might have even have jeeps in the World War I. And so people kind of, it became a nostalgic thing, a Jeep, you know, to have a Jeep. and so you started with a with a very very you know almost a hundred-year-old design and of course it's exterior we're talking about the look of the Jeep but I got to believe that somehow rather the the overall charisma of the Jeep is a nostalgic thing and the focus was on being sexy because you know all a Jeep is a Jeep is a Jeep I see some jeeps on the road that don't look like jeeps I'm guessing that they don't sell very well. The ones that sell the best are the ones that look most like the Jeep

you saw in World War II. And I think equality, and certainly the safety of the Jeep, has suffered from that. You can't build a safe car that looks like a Jeep. I just don't think you can do it. Engineering-wise, it's impossible.

So you're sacrificing something there, and I believe it also spreads out to the quality issue. Absolutely. Ladies and gentlemen, give us a call. 877-960-99-60. I certainly hope that Howard didn't have another question. I think I just heard him hang up.

Okay, the text is 772-497-6530, and let's take a pause for the cause, and that is the Attorney General. You can definitely help us out to get her attention by giving her a call at 850-4-1-4-1-4-1. 414-3-3-0-0. Or you can download this document that's on Erlon Cars and complete it and send it to the Attorney General. We've got to put a lid on these car dealers that are taking advantage of the consumers. So take a look at that at Erlon Cars.

Ashley Moody, Ashley Moody. Attorney General Ashley Moody, she can do a whole lot for it. us. We're going to go to Frank, who's calling us. Good morning, Frank. Good morning, Bill. I thought about you this morning when I was up at 6th and was wondering what the sunrise is going to look like if it was on the beach. Did you do a sunrise video this morning? Absolutely. I never missed one. I've even been out there in thunderstorms or downpours. It's just a matter of a pride that I never miss being there when the sun always rises, but sometimes

You just can't sleep. Sometimes it's really exciting. We change our clothes during the sunrise two or three times, like the other morning. Thanks for asking. No, actually, I do have a question for Rick. Right. My son has a new truck from you guys. It's about 500 miles.

And now I find sometimes when he starts it, white smoke comes down for a few seconds. Is that something that you should bring it back? That means your car has chosen a new Pope. All right, that's a joke. Very good. That was quick. I like that. I try. If you're only seeing just a little puff, just the first moment, the only thing I would question is, is it smoke,

or is it just a little bit of steam from water condensation that has built up in the exhaust overnight? Especially here in Florida, we have so much humidity and the rain and everything, you know, the water vapor gets in there, and when you first start the engine, that steam is going to burst out, you know, as it fires up and it's got all that heat coming through the catalytic converter and that, that little burst of steam coming out could be just normal water vapor and nothing to worry about at all.

Okay, well, he's going to come to visit me tomorrow, so I'll start it on Monday and see for myself. Yeah. The best thing, too, is when he starts it, have your phone handy and just get a video of it. And if it's smoke, smoke will usually hang around in the air for a moment or two. Steam, of course, will dissipate almost immediately. As soon as it comes out of the pipe, you'll see it just vanish away, whereas smoke will kind of hang for a couple of seconds. Yeah, that's very true. Like I said, he's in mind, and these will be here. And I recall that little thing from my entire team that was sold years ago with the alignment. So those were really, I think, unclassical things to have around again. Yeah, they were really cool. It helped you understand why you should have an alignment done to your car to keep your tires in good shape.

Very true. Unfortunately, I had that done with Mercedes. because I guess the ball joints or something on that must have went out, you know, $1,000 where the tires are already shot. Oh, yeah. One warm consultant can wear tires very, very quickly. All right. Well, you guys have a good weekend. We enjoy your show and enjoy your dealership.

I stand behind you 100% of the mask. Thanks, right. Thanks very much. My son, I think. Yeah, take it. Thank you. Great hearing from you. Okay, thank you very much.

Let's get back to some of the other texts that we got coming in, or do we have another caller? We got some, I don't know if we have a caller. No. Okay, anonymous feedback then. And I'm really excited to read this one. Kudos to Stu, who during last week's show had the Consumer Reports answer readily available to help out a caller instead of just dancing around a referral to Zoom reports, for the caller to scratch her head on how to get a subscription.

sign up, pay, get frustrated and finding the answer. No, no, Stu was ready like a samurai, with his katana ready to draw blood. Okay, that took a weird turn. Love y'all. Bye. What can I say? That's probably one of the best anonymous feedbacks we've ever gotten,

and I like to be prepared. Did you see my reply? I did not. I cannot see this. See, I replied this to that caller. I said, you know, I said there's an old saying, I don't know whether it's Chinese or Indian or British. I'm not sure what. It says, teach a man, catch a fish for a man and give

it to him and he has a meal. Teach a man how to fish and he can feed himself for life. Yes. So one of the things that we do, we could make this show entirely about getting them with Consumer Reports and Google and answering every single question. But we teach people that if they go to Google, if they go to Consumer Reports, Consumer Reports.org, they can find out answers about anything on cars or any products. We're teaching you how to fish when we constantly remind you about consumer reports and about Google. But sometimes we do Google and give you the answer on the air, and sometimes we do to go to consumer reports and give you the answer on the air.

But I think we would take up too much time if we did that for every single question. You just can't take that they like me more than you. Oh, I know they like it. All right, we have a text here. This is some legal advice, and it's about the out-the-door price affidavit. It says, Earl, I'm not sure that Nancy can call her affidavit and an affidavit. I believe it's a memorandum because an affidavit must be sworn to under oath before a notary. I'm an Ohio attorney, and possibly the laws in Florida are different to allow it to be called an affidavit.

If that is the case, I stand corrected, and that's Joe from Ohio. And I think, I mean, I don't know that we're not making illegal claim. I mean, it's in the form of an affidavit. It's a poetic license. If we say affidavit, it gets people's attention. And we sometimes get a little careless. If you're an attorney, I respect, I'm sure you're correct about that, technically, but an affidavit, obviously it's not an affidavit.

I know what an affidavit is, but it just sounds better. It's designed to get the attention of the salesperson, the manager, and basically you put them on front street. I got something serious here I've got to deal with, and now I'm being called to, you know, to put up some, you know, the real numbers. Exactly. So, yeah, it probably wouldn't hold up in court, but the idea is to get you a good price while you're there, get the outdoor price.

Yeah, it just gets your attention when you walk into a dealership. That's what it was meant for. Okay. Anne-Marie sent a text. Anne-Marie says, good morning, and happy Father's Day. It's the rainy season here in Florida. What's the best way to dry a vehicle out if one finds that they forgot to close a window or a sunroof? Gosh, I hope that didn't happen yesterday.

And the vehicle is soaked. Just wondering, hoping this is only a theoretical question for everyone. Thanks. Oh, boy. Rick, right? Yeah. I need to drive the inside of a vehicle out. My recommendation is the first thing I would do is blot up any standing water you can with towels,

get as much of it out as you can. A wet dry back to suck up anything that you can as much as you can. Yeah. And then I would invest a lot of money, probably 60, 70, 100 bucks in damp red. And I would just fill the car with those packets of dampers, the big buckets, close up all the windows and let it sit in the sun. So all that water vapor basically gets steamed up and it can then be absorbed by the damp red. I've used it. It is definitely something.

It's amazing. It's a fantastic product. surprises a heck out of you. And your old condo, you had gallons of water a day, I think. Didn't you use it in the old condo? You had a moisture problem up there. Yeah, definitely. We're going to go to a caller, and I believe that she is from Green Acres.

You'll have to excuse me. My age is showing. I've got a little bit of blurred vision here. I think it's Helene. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome. Hi, thank you.

It is, Haley? I have a question. Yes, it is. Oh, okay. Yes, I'm sorry. I may have a very bad connection due to the fact that... Haleen, are you a first-time caller? No, believe it or not, I did call about five or six months ago,

but I never got to complete anything. Oh, you didn't? No, I didn't. I did ask him a question on how do I go about my... my leased car and this was back I think in December when I called and I did purchase my lease car in January and I had just noticed this past week in my rear seat behind the driver's area that I have a stain on my back seat and it looks like a water stain and I never noticed it before

and until just this past month and I was wondering my window was up good and tight and I don't know if somebody tried to Jimmy to get into the back of my car or not but I noticed on the rubber that, you know, goes up tight against the door because I was trying to look and to see

how could this possibly be any water staying on my back feet there. And I noticed it looked like a rough spot on the rubber. So I don't know if somebody tried to, like I said, try to get in.

They didn't break the rubber or anything. It just looks kind of lost up, you know. Like there was an attempt made or something. I don't know. I don't know. It wasn't, I've never noticed it before.

but now I am and maybe because it is the wreaths their rainy season and I do not I do not have a bladge it sits out and it does get the sun and that particular spot gets sun too in the day until 11 o'clock in the morning you know did the rubber seal look like it actually been like was there a gap like can you like the does it look like it was torn it just looks like it was like an abrasion no it just looks yeah a slate abrasion yeah and did the the wet mark on the seat, did that eventually dry? Was it water for sure? I have no idea.

It's a stain there. I docked stained. Oh, so it hasn't gotten away. It looks like it was a water stain. Any chance you carried any groceries in the back seat recently? That maybe something leaked out of a bag or takeout? Well, it could have happened several months ago, but I can't say lately. No, I usually put everything in the chunk of my car, so I don't know if, how can I get that doc staying out?

You just spoke of putting that. Yeah, I would try a professional auto retailer. Like, there's places like the North Lake Auto Spot. I'm not sure where you're located. I forgot. But there's plenty of places. I would maybe look online for, like, a reputable has got good reviews. Yeah, but I can't, I'm sorry, I can't afford that.

I'm 82 years old, and I live on a very tight budget. Okay. Then, let's see, a do-it-yourself opera? What do you think? I would look at... I'm pretty good at doing things myself. I'm a jack-of-all-trade for the master of none, I always say. Haleen, you're my kind of girl.

You know, as a last resort, I rely on baking soda and vinegar, and it's really safe on everything. You're not going to, you know, lift the color out of the seat or destroy it in any way, and it's worth a shot. So I'll let Rick weigh in on this. Yeah, I'd give that a try Or like at Walmart or Target You can get

Shampoo It's meant for the car like that And I would give that a try Okay, I will Okay, thank you so much You're welcome, Haleen. Give us a call again Let us know how that turned out A little mystery there

Okay, thank you And by the way, your advice On buying my lease Worked out perfectly And I went to Earl Stewart up in North West Palm Beach and they treated me very well.

Oh, thank you, Haley. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Stay in touch. Have a wonderful weekend. 877-960-99-60 or you can text us at 772-497-3-0.

Don't forget, your anonymous feedback.com. Now back to Stu. Okay, we got a text from Robert and Orlando. He says, love of the information you provide to car consumers. I've been shopping online for a late model used car. Do you have any words of wisdom on getting the itemized out-the-door price before you go to the dealer? I've emailed two dealers, but they will not give it to me. They want me to come into the dealership.

Surprise. Let me jump in on that one. I had something I wanted to mention on the subjective used cars anyway. Their rental companies now are selling a lot of cars. and Hertz in particular. And Hertz has a website, Hertzcar Sales.com. A lot of people think that the rental companies

are dumping these cars on the market and their car dealers are buying them up and things like that. There may be some of this going on, but Avis and Hertz, a lot of these companies sell cars directly enterprise. You might try, going to HertzCarsales.com.

We found out something interesting. We found out that they are retailing these cars for very good prices. They have their certified cars, and then they have a rent-to-buy plan. You can rent the car for two or three days, and if you decide to buy it, you apply your rental payments toward the purchase.

That's not the good deal. The prices to the Hertz rental cars higher on that deal than just the straight I'll buy the car. It's a certified car. One good thing about Hertz and Davis and Enterprise is there's not a haggle deal. It is one price. They sell their cars for the price online plus tax attack and they probably try to get you for a dealer fee like everybody does. But anybody out there in the market for a relatively late model used car, I would check with Hertz in particular. Be careful. You've got to be careful anytime you buy a used car, but the rental car companies are selling a lot of cars.

Avis, last month, sold 10,000 cars, which is something like 25% of their whole fleet. Hertz is also, as you know, is in bankruptcy, and they need some cash. That's the reason they declare bankruptcy, and they are, but they're not wholesaling the cars. They're retailing them, and they're making a profit. But our expert in my dealership on the wholesale into things said that they're selling these retail cars Hertz for $3 to $500 over auction prices, and that's a really good deal. Be careful, but check out Hertz at Hertzcar Sales.com. Great information. We're going to go to Pompano Beach where Warren is waiting to speak to us.

Good morning, Warren. Hi, good morning, guys. How are you today? Great. Earl, I have a question for you. When you lease a car, and let's say the car's, let's say the price would be $30,000, and I came in and gave you a check for $30,000, and I walked out. But I want to lease the car.

And the total lease payment, let's say, $17,000. You know, however you figure it out, that payment, the monthly payment, you get $17,000. How do you make more money on the lease than a lease? If I wrote a check for the car, and how do you do that? What is the formula for that? It's just curious. Well, the dealers do make more money on leases. And the reason they make more money is because they can manipulate the payment

and the down payment and the trade-in a lot more deceptively than in a purchase. And the average profit on a lease, I would say, is probably about $1,000 higher than the average profit on a lease. purchase. There's more hidden fees than a lease. With lease, you have an inception fee, which you probably don't even know you pay. That'll be $7, $8,900, but you don't know you pay it because they bury it in the lease payment. There's also a mileage fee. If you go over your mileage, you allotted, it can be anywhere from as low as $5,000, typically around $10,000, $15,000,000, $15,000,000, is average, but if you go over the 10,000 allowance per year, that you can charge your 18, 20, 25 cents a mile, there's a disposition fee when you turn the lease in. If you don't buy another car, at least another car of that make,

you charge a disposition fee, which can be several hundred dollars. There's also the classic hidden fee that you would have paid if you bought the car, but they don't waive that when you lease their car. So if you're sophisticated and you're careful, you read the contract, and you do your homework, you can lease a car to answer your question for as little as you could buy a car. In fact, sometimes lease cars have incentives that you don't get on purchase cars because the manufacturers love you leasing a car because if you lease a car, you're far more likely to lease another or buy another car of that make. Dealers like it for that reason too.

So the whole industry, the retail, the manufacturers, all are pushing, pushing, pushing to get you at lease rather than buy. And they do make more money, but they don't have to make more money if you're careful. The question that they actually had, just the curiosity, is that let's say the lease payment, making $17,000, the car was $30,000. So how do you get the differential? In other words, if we walked in and gave you a check for $30,000 and drove out the car, and over a period of time, you're only paying $17,000, of course, you're returning the car. Do you get the full $30,000 from the leasing company that they send you a check or Toyota leasing? How does that work?

Yeah, when you lease a car, first of all, I just want to compliment you. Getting the actual sale price prior to getting a lease payment and insisting that that sale price be used to calculate the lease payment, that's how you avoid a lot of the getting overcharged. It still doesn't protect you against all the fees and other, you know, traps that are all just listed, like the disposition fee and all that. No, when you lease a car, the dealer, basically you're only paying the bank the amount that the car depreciates, and then there's a rental charge that's part of that. The dealer gets paid, gets funded by the bank the same way he does if he had bought the car.

So, but basically, since the leasing company is, most of the time, is going to get the vehicle back, they're going to resell the car. So they're only charging you for the amount that's used, so to speak. So it's just the depreciation, the rental charge, and, of course, the hidden fees that are built into most leases. But do you get, but I'm just curious on your end, in other words, if you link the car and I drive out with the showroom with the car, do you get a check for the full, in other words, if the car was $30,000, Do you still get the $30,000? Yeah, we get funded in full.

The vehicle leaves our inventory, and now it's now owned by the bank. The bank pays us for the whole car, and then the lease payment arrangement is between you and the bank, and you're only paying for, you know, a part of the car, I guess. Oh, that was a question. And I just add about the disposition, Steve, I never heard of that before. Like, I have two residents, like I have one in Pompano Beach and one up here in New Jersey, which I am. The disposition fee, I never heard it. And they may put that in there, but like, is that just down there in Florida, disposition

fee, if you don't want the car again, you're going to charge you for it, or can you negotiate that out? You possibly can. You can. It is from the bank. Now, you can negotiate something with the dealer if you're aware of the disposition fee. And by the way, that's not just Florida. These are national fees, and it depends on the lender. And usually most of the leasing going on in the –

country now is done by the by the manufacturers lending arms it's not there's not a whole lot of banks that are like Bank of America's not doing um vehicle leasing like they used to um yeah you could say see here's the thing people don't know about the disposition this disposition fee if they keep leasing cars because it never comes up because it's a wave when you release the car if you keep leasing the car from the same manufacturer yeah if you go back if you decide just to turn it in and you're done with uh that for you're done with that hot or buying the car either exactly then you're going to find that about that fee. But if you know about it, when you're leasing the car, you can make an arrangement.

It says, I'll tell you what, I'll take this car, this payment, blah, blah, blah. But I want you to take care of that disposition fee. And if you got that in writing, you might got a shot of them paying it for you. But they're still jacking the price to the cover. The disposition fee, if you don't lease or buy another car of that make, is got to be paid to the leasing company. Now, you can lower the price of the car. or, you know, it's getting paid to the leasing company,

and you can use that as a leverage to negotiate a better lease payment, and if you can, more power to you. I lease the car that I had now, but then I bought it off the lease because I had too many miles on it. And I don't remember them charging me that, and I could be wrong. I just don't remember. Oh, you got charged, if you didn't buy another lease car from it. There's so many things you don't see,

And probably the biggest thing I forgot to mention is wear and tear when you turn that car in. Not only they get you with a disposition fee, but they will look at that car with a very, very severe eye and charge you a lot of money. It's a profit source for leasing companies to overcharge you for the above normal wear and tear. That you can negotiate, and you should. and probably the biggest single piece of advice I give anybody that leases a car is be present when the inspection is made of your car and take pictures of the interior and exterior and the tires and make notes and see to you when you see the inspection report and you sign off on it be sure it's accurate mileage is very important a lease car can sit around a car dealership for three weeks or longer salesman loves cars with a full tank of gas they hop up and in that car, put an extra 300 miles on the car, you're paying for it. So when you turn your car in, be sure that you're not hammered with thousands of dollars in charges for above a normal wear and tear. Just one more quick question. Does it make any sense have a friend

who's leasing one brand? She wants to get another one. And the dealer that she wants to lease them from says, don't worry, we'll take care of everything on the old car. You know, she had a Honda, and now she wants to lease a Mercedes. And the dealer said to her, oh, just give us the car. We'll take care of everything. You have like a month's payment left. We'll pay for you, blah, blah, blah. Just fine on the deal.

Is that a smart move, a dumb move world, depends on the dealer? They're adding the payments into the price for the Mercedes. Whatever car she's driving, now she owes one or two lease payments. They're paying the leasing company. They've got to get paid. They're going to get all their money. And the dealer, she's lying another car from, they've taken that money paying the leasing company

and adding it to the price of the Mercedes. That's also a great question to do because it depends on the dealer because you're counting on them to do a lot of things for you. You're counting them to actually... Yeah, they're counting on them to actually contact the leasing company, make sure it's transported back to them, make sure they're doing the odometer statement correctly.

There's a lot of pitfalls, so you have to trust the dealer that's handling it for you. If it's a reputable dealership, I think you've got a better shot of them doing it right, but you could easily have that car parked up, that lot for months and then you get a bill for payments that weren't made and you got to make sure that so stay on top of it i would i would just be really careful there all right i'll tell it up because she doesn't want to be bothered they're just to drive the honda here and we'll take

care of everything you don't have to worry about going back to the honda deal you don't have to do this you don't have to do that you drive out with your new car and we'll take care she should do a little just a little legwork she should probably if she does turn it into the mercedes dealers to contact them hey, is my car still there? Maybe also contact the leasing company I guess it's Honda American Credit and say, I dropped it off at ABC Mercedes on this date with this

many miles. Let them, just don't completely wash your hands of it because it'd come back to Biter. Okay, thank you very much, guys. Good luck with it. Thank you, Warren. Thanks for tuning in. 877-960 where you can text us at 772-4976530.

of a text. I have one from Betty, and she is texting me from Tampa, and she wants to know who gets taken advantage of more often when you walk into a dealership. Well, before I ask the guys to give their advice and their answer, I'm going to say the elderly, especially widows. also on that list are the people that don't understand or speak English very well also the very young that they're buying their car for the first time and you know like I always say it just pays to do your homework and it's really important and most of all the people that have bad credit what do you have to add to that Earl?

I think you're answered perfectly that's a good answer. Okay, Betty. Give me another text. We're going to be right here for you to answer your questions. Now back to Stu. All right. Kyle wants to now. He says, if I want a 2021 Toyota Corolla Hybrid, what's a reasonable discount I could expect since there wouldn't be much, if any, from the manufacturer?

Thanks, stay healthy. And that's from Kyle. Well, the Corolla Hybrid first came out last year of the 2020 and the 2021s just started hitting dealership plots about. about two or three weeks ago. So at this point, especially given the inventory situation and given that the Corolla Hybrid is a very, it's a pretty low supply vehicle,

I wouldn't expect a huge discount. As a matter of fact, I'd probably expect you to pay probably around MSRP. Now that's not to say that dealers won't be discounting at some. On True car, it's showing an average discount of around $500, which is, there's not a lot of markup in that car

and that doesn't sound like a huge discount. but I would be very skeptical about that because of all the hidden fees and other things you're going to run into at the dealership so you might see a $500 discount and then the addition of $1,500 in dealer fees. I hope this doesn't sound too self-serving but we are Toyota dealership in total transparency

and no matter where you are in the country if you want an idea of what a price of a car is you can go to our website earlstuart Toyota.com sounds like I'm doing advertising. I'm getting nervous just saying this, but we're not. If you're in Utah, if you're in Tallahassee, wherever your Toyota dealership is you're working with. If you want to frame a reference, you can go to our

website. We're the only car dealership I know of that will give you a true out-the-door price. Take our price and then take it to the dealer in your town and say, I can buy the car here for this price. If you'll meet it or beat it, I'll buy it from you. And we post all of our prices. Sometimes it's not the lowest price. We like to think that usually it is a good price. It's obviously not always the lowest price.

If it were, we'd sell all the toilets in the world, but we don't. So we put our best price, which is something no other dealer does. Take a price from our website, Earlestowattoil.com, to your dealer, and get them to meet it. If you live in Miami,

Fort Lauderdale, if you're in Orlando, you can take that price, to your dealer and if you're careful and don't let them sneak in any hidden fees we give you an out-the-door price that's a price you can write a checkout for get in your car that you bought and drive it home if you can if they'll meet that price you get yourself a pretty good deal and I can give you a preview on our website we are at MSRP no fees and we have an out-to-door price right up there so you got you take that and compare it to your local dealer or call around your local

will say we'll meet that and they'll add $1,000 in hidden fees. So if they're going to match that price, that's the price that you're right at checkout for, hand it to the salesman, you get in your car and you drive it home. That's an out-the-door price. Exactly. And the

Toyota hybrids represent a tiny percentage of all the Toyota Corollos out there, so there's not a whole lot to choose from out there in the world right now. Exactly. Okay. Rick's got a YouTube over here. Wayne is asking, when you opt to buy a car

you have been leasing can you buy directly from the lease company or does it have to be sold through a dealership? Unfortunately you have to go through the dealer the dealer will add a hidden fee and they mostly often will not vary from that you can shop around and sometimes

you can find a dealer that make that won't charge you the hidden fee or at least the hidden fee will be smaller but one of the biggest rip-offs we know of is when you exercise your option to buy a car you have it in writing, which you can buy the car for. It's in the lease contract with the leasing company,

but the car dealer will still add his hidden fee. I think this represents a potential huge class action suit. We've got attorneys listening to this show. We know because we just had anonymous feedback from one. So if you're an attorney out there and you want to make a ton of money, do a national class action suit on all those people who have exercised there are options to purchase their lease car, and we're not able to buy it for the contractual price that the leasing company promised them they could buy for.

And they were added probably around $1,000 or more in hidden fees. That's a doozy of a class action suit. Plus they get you back in the box again on the same car. Three years ago, you were in the box, and they get you back on the exact same car. I'm going to try and say a bunch of stuff again. And I want 10% when you do that. I want 10% of it. You're going to make millions.

And I'm going to donate it to Big Dog Grants Rescue, of course. That's what we always do. All right. I've got a text from Steve in New Jersey. It's from Rick. He says, can you recommend a protective plastic film for headlights? Just about a new car would like to reduce the typical fogging that occurs. I'm going to recommend potatoes, man.

I'm just kidding. No, not yet. I did buy a protective film and install it on one headlight. on my own pickup, and I'm evaluating it because what I did was I restored my headlights, both had perfect clear headlights, put a protective film on one side, it's been now about two and a half, three months, and I really don't see a huge difference yet, but it's only been a few months. Give it time. So within another three months, I will have a recommendation because six months I should start seeing some change to see, is that film making a difference versus the other side

headlight, which does not have the film. And when you get the ticket from the police for having a defective one headlight, I'm going to reimburse you because you were doing it in the name of duty. Of science. Doing it in science. Well, there you go, Steve. If that happens, I will bring the ticket. I don't get one, but if it does happen, I will bring it. All right. So thanks, Steve. And also, Steve is a regular listener. He listens every week, text us every week. He's called. So I know you'll be listening for the update. So Rick will keep us informed. All right, we got George from West Hartford, Connecticut, says, my wife recently purchased a 2013

Lexus RX-450. We're new to hybrids. Is there any maintenance that needs to be done to hybrids that we should be doing regularly? Mr. Kearney. Again, that book in the glove compartment that says factory, the Lexus Factory

Recommended Maintenance, just follow it like a little Bible, and you'll be just fine. And we see, in our experience with our hybrids, with our dealership, the hybrids typically require have less problems. Oh yeah. Yeah. The cars are more

trouble-free. I guess that's because in the sum total of running, they have fewer moving parts. You still have a gasoline engine but it doesn't use it as much as a normal gasoline engine. And your normal gasoline piston internal combustion engine is

what really creates a lot of problems. Have a cool thing. I will throw one other thing out there. Find a good car wash in your area that has an underbody wash. and use it regularly, especially in the wintertime when you start getting that road salt. And being in Connecticut, you know, you're somewhat close to the ocean in some places. I know West Hartford is a ways from it.

But even then, still run it through the one that will wash the underside of the car and make sure that any road salt or debris gets washed off of there very regularly. Good advice. I also got a little bonus thing. It's something that we discovered just real world selling hybrids for about 20 years now. You get a lot less breakware with a hybrid because the hybrids use the regenerative braking. And we see that how long you'll see brake pads last on a hybrid, on a Prius, for example. Double.

Yeah. Double what are comfortable. A gas car would go. That's pretty good. It saves you a little money there. Yep. All right. Vicki in Stewart, Florida, says, hi.

I recently had tires replaced on my 2010 Chevy Express 1500. Since then, one of the tire sensors is showing a fault. A few days after, a warning message to turn. The AC off engine, sorry, turn the AC off engine is running hot, should on the dash. I turned the AC off, pressed a reset button, then the AC worked great. The AC and hot engine warning is randomly happening for the past few days now. Could the tire sensor issue be throwing off the computer system and causing the AC and hot running engine problem? Thank you for all your knowledge, Vicki and Stewart.

Very unlikely. Those are going to be two separate systems. When they replace the tires, if they accidentally damaged one of those sensors, cracked it a little bit. And as you're driving down the road, the centrifugal force finally caused it to break. That would cause that tire light to come on. But I can't see really how that would affect the air conditioning and engine running hot. That sounds like you've got an issue with the cooling system of the engine. And therefore, the computer, when it sees that engine temperature getting too high,

it's shutting off the air conditioner in order to put less strain on the engine and help it run a little cooler. So I would get that evaluated very quickly before you take a chance on blowing up your engine. Yeah, that's true. Okay, the last text, and it's almost getting the mystery shopping report time too.

So that's got John from California, he says when returning a lease car, what's the proper tire tread depth to be able to use to not to get a new set of tires or is it depending on where you live? it's going to be up to the individual leasing companies what they require. I've seen 5.30 seconds, 3 30 seconds, and 2.30 seconds. So I would check your lease contract, John, because you're out in California.

I'm not sure what you lease. So it's going to be in the contract. Yeah, the general guideline, the federal government and all their vehicles, there are tens of millions of vehicles. They recommend, or they do, replace their tires at 2.30 seconds. And that's pretty slick. 2.30 seconds is pretty slick. At our dealership, we recommend below 3.30 seconds, just as it drops below 3.30 seconds. But the student says each leasing company is different. And, you know, for our used car department, we'd probably use a more generous thing. We'd probably say, what, 4.30 seconds?

Five? Yeah. So it's a variable thing. And be careful because it gets expensive to replace those tires. These are the things you don't know when you lease a car. What condition does this car have to be in before they hose me when I come back and turn it in? Not only that, you're a victim of a subjective opinion from one guy working for a data company. A guy shows up. He's not a highly trained anything. He shows up and he goes to a checklist and it's up to his personal opinion on what's excessive. Yeah, and I don't want to sound like I'm one of these paranoid conspiracy people.

But I really believe that the leasing companies look at the aboveware and tear on the return lease vehicles as a profit center. I think they have a profit center here. Cars come in. They're going to be very careful not to lose any money. And how do you be real sure you don't lose any money? You charge too much money. You're going to miss some and you're going to have some sneak in on you and you have to fix them. it costs your money. So they err on the side of conservatism in terms of what they charge

you. So they come in, they find maybe $600 worth of damage or stains or dense or whatever. And then they said, listen, let's make that $900. They round up. Always contest what the charge is. Go to the dealer, go directly to the leasing company, raise holy hell, and you'll usually get some sort of an adjustment. Maybe not, they're not going to take it all off. You have to make yourself heard. Here's a perfect example that we actually experienced and it's gotten better now, but if, let's

say you got a scratch on your car and you had a little paint work done on the bumper. It's done professionally, you can't even tell it's there. Yes, that does impact the resell value of the car, but that's the risk that the leasing company took on. So you return the car, they go around, they check it out and they see there's evidence of paintwork. It looks

like a brand new car, but they knew it was painted. They'll send you a bill for a substandard work. Most people will pay that bill. The ones they get upset about it and call us, we call the leasing company, and they say, we'll just show us a receipt that you had it done in a reputable body shop.

And that's just dishonest. They wave it off, so they're trying you on. They're trying to say, like, well, most people pay it, 10% are going to complain, and we'll let them off the hook. That's not right. Okay, we are caught up with text and anonymous feedback on my end. Anybody else? Okay, folks. We're going to hear from Rick.

We're good over here. Are we? Okay, great. Hey, listen to our listeners. I want to let you know that Earl's column this past week, you can find it Earl on Cars. And it is car dealerships, endangering customers. And, of course, you know, the topic is most salespeople are not wearing face masks. And you can find that, as I said, Earl on Cars.

We have a great mystery shopping report coming up from. from way up there in Fort Pierce. Ladies and gentlemen, we would love to hear your vote. So text us at 772-497-6530. Now we're going to get back to the recovering car dealer. Keep the text and the YouTube's coming because we'll probably get through this before the end of the show,

and then we can get back to the text or the YouTube, the Twitters, or whatever it may be. We actually have kind of like two mystery shopping reports. one of them is not a real Mr. Sharping report but with the with the on vent of this terrible coronavirus and the epidemic proportions increasing in a lot of states especially Florida and a couple of others you know Florida looked like everything was going well and then it switched around and now the number of cases hospitalizations and deaths all of us going to up. It's kind of frightening. We thought we should pursue our coverage of those car dealerships

that are not requiring their salespeople to wear a mask. We had a controversial Anonymous Feedback.com on that subject saying I was shaming dealers that didn't require their employees to wear a mask or their customers to wear a mask. So I won't go over that again. But we are trying to do our best to change their behavior. So in addition to our regular missing shopping report, we went to quickly on automotive row where a lot of car dealers were clustered. We sent Agent X or Agent I'm sorry Thunder. Anyway, we sent Agent in to see who's wearing masks and who are not. So I'll cover this quickly. This isn't our local area here,

but it's probably true in your area wherever you are listening or watching the show. I would like to say that at Arrigo Dodge, most of the staff were wearing masks. So kudos to Rigo Dodge, and that was the one in Okatchelopee Boulevard in West Palm Beach. So good for you, but get it up to 100%, will you? Arrigo, most is not where you ought to be, but congratulations. You're a lot better than most of the other dealers. Good job, Jimmy and John. Now let me go to Schumacher Infinity, also in West Palm Beach, maybe two salesmen wearing masks.

Everyone else had no mask on. So Schumacher infinity, I know Chuck Schumacher. I knew his father, Dick Schumacher. Dick has passed away a long time ago. Chuck, if you're out there, get on these guys at your Schumacher Infinity in West Palm Beach. And I know you will agree with me. They should be wearing a mask and they should at least recommend, if not require customers to wear a mask. Schumacher Volvo, everyone was wearing a mask. Again, Chuck, congratulations. But whoever's overseeing things in infinity is not doing their job. The people at Volvo are doing their job.

So kudos to Schumacher Volvo. Everyone was wearing a mask. We really hit all the Schumacher dealerships, I guess, in that area. Schumacher GMC in North Lake, everyone seemed to be wearing a mask. So Chuck, Schumacher, you've only got one real problem in that group of your stores on North Lake Boulevard, and that is your Infinity store. And you need to have the salespeople wear their masks there. Napleton on North Lake, no one, not one single person in Napleton, on North Lake. I wonder which

dealership that was on North Lake. Chrysler Plymouth? We don't have that. I'll check with Stu. He just had to leave the room briefly. But Napleton on North Lake and any of your other stores, at Napleton, you live in the area, you may hear about this radio show.

Talk to your managers on your stores, but you have a Napleton dealership on North Lake, and no one is wearing a mask. Nissan Green Acres, and that's owned by Terry Taylor Group, Nissan and Green Acres, about 75% were not wearing masks. 75% were not wearing masks. So Terry Taylor, you're the owner. Get the limited partner, I think you have limited partners in your dealerships,

and your general manager is not doing his job. job at Nissan Green Acres. Toyota Stewart. Congratulations, kudos to Toyota Stewart. All the salespeople at Toyota Stewart are wearing their mask. And congratulations. We go to infinity of Stewart

and no one was wearing the mask there except the receptionist. All the salesmen walking around without mask. All the customers walking around without mask. walking around without mass. And finally, Wallace Kia. I know Bill Wallace. In fact, I know the Infinity, I think they sold out. I used to know the owner there. Bill Wallace, Wallace Kia, no one was wearing masks there, Bill. Now, you and I know each other? Maybe I'll shoot you an email. Get them on the stick. Get them apply. They should be there in a very serious era of COVID-19.

If you want to sell more cars, make your customers and your employees feel safe. So that sums it up. We had Wallace Kia, Infinity as Stewart, Napleton. Oh, Sue, do you know which dealership? Napolton, North Lake, which franchise

that was? Chrysler Plymouth. I think it was CDJ, but I'll double check. Okay, Chrysler Plymouth. Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep. Yeah, Chrysler, Jop. And the Schumacher, Volvo, and Schumacher Infinity.

So you got, no, Schumacher Volvo was a compliant. Schumacher Infinity was not wearing a bath. So that sums it up, and now we'll go to our regular mystery shopping report. Okay, let me mention Steve, who was holding from Boynton. Sorry we couldn't get to you, Steve. Give us a call or text us next week. Thank you for listening. Okay, mystery shopping report of Coggin Honda in Fort Pierce.

For some reason, we keep forgetting, and this is true, We keep forgetting to mystery shop, Coggin dealerships. Back in 2016, the 13th year of our mystery shopping on the radio, we realized we'd never investigated a Coggin dealership. In 13 years. Yeah, 13. We targeted Coggin Honda in Fort Pierce. They failed, and we never went back in there.

By the way, Cagan is now owned by the Sonic Group. It's a public group. is say, I believe it's publicly traded on the exchange. It might be. It's a large public group of probably 75 dealerships, maybe 100. So it's part of a big chain. The Coggin, there was a Coggin. Luther Coggin, is sold out many, many years ago.

Four years is too long to go between mystery shops at any one of our dealerships. So we've got to get back into the rhythm and hit things more evenly. we see this every week as we move from dealership to dealership a recommended dealer can be non-recommended and vice versa they have turnover in salespeople, management

and you can see it in the Schumacher thing earlier. Schumacher Affinity is doing a bad job and Schumacher Volvo is doing a great job so within organizations there's no continuity consistency even under

the same ownership Although we've waited too long to return to Kagan Honda, I can assure you it was worth the wait. Every so often, we stumble across a true gym, something we can hold up as a genuine first. And we got ourselves one here with Kagan Honda at Fort Pierce. Examples of this sort of thing where we find something we've never seen before was Napleton's disability rebate, as low as you can go, disability rebate. Beth Smith uses a special program only available to health care workers. Hopefully you don't see that anymore, but that's really low. This week at Kagan Honda, we found the holy grail of hidden fees.

We'll get into the detail in a minute. Looking over Kagan's Honda's website, we saw they offered online buying, just like every car dealer. They're all jumping on that bandwagon now, claims to have. We selected a new 2020 Honda Accord and began going through the steps to find our online price. MSRP was $24,975. There was an itemized discount of $1982, which gave us a sale price of $22,993. Then they added fees of $1,292.70 and sales tax. It was the breakdown of fees

Here's the You've never seen this before It was a breakdown of fees It flabbergasted this Never in the history of this radio show Have we seen anything so ridiculous It's comical I actually thought it was a joke at first

But it wasn't a joke I'll now read to you from the Holy Grail Of Hila I tried to lick my finger Of hidden fees I don't want to let's do that But I can't turn the page Okay, these are all the hidden fees

that are broken down in absurd minutia teeny weenie and a few biggies slipped in there. These are the hidden fees and we don't know. I wish we could play theme music at this point. Bear with me. Advanced replacement, I have no idea. $2.80. State transportation fee. Don't know. $21. Service charge.

$2.00. and 50 cents transportation disadvantaged yeah a dollar 50 agency fee you know agency fee four dollars and seventy five cents lemon law two dollars i know what that is if that's a legitimate fee uh for two bucks juvenile justice no idea only a dollar for that a dollar come step it up initial registration fee now we're certainly zoomed up there uh 200 and $25. We don't know what that is. It's probably a tag agency or something like that. Security fee, no idea, a dollar. Is that for the night watchman? You're not paying them enough. I don't know. Maybe he gets it all. I don't know. Title service fee, $4.25. Plate fee, $28.

Surcharge state transportation, a $1.20. Lien fee, $2. What if you don't finance a car? There's no liens, right? No. Reflectorization. That's my second favorite one. Reflectorization. Can you see them sitting around the room making up these names? Hey, I got one. Okay, Joe, what is it?

Reflectorization. What's that? Okay, put it down. It doesn't matter. We don't care. Law enforcement radio system. Hey, it's only a dollar. That's only a dollar.

Air pollution control, a dollar. title fee $48. We have no idea what these are. Registration fee it might be, it might not be. Odometer fee. What is that? Frithes.

Frivis. Frivis. Frivis. Frivis. Frivis. Frivis. Listen to this one. Emergency Medical Service. Guess how much? A dime. Ten cents. It must not be a high-quality service.

Emergency medical service, 10 cents. A dime, I kid you're not. This is on Luther, I say Luther, Cog and Honda in Fort Pierce. When you buy the car, they have a hidden fee that they call emergency medical service, and it's 10 cents. Who's going to argue? Decal on demand, no idea. $1. Pre-delivery service fee, now we're getting into the meat of it.

This is the common hidden fee at the bottom. See, you doze off when you go through these, and you don't even see the $799 pre-delivery service fee or the private tag agency fee of $98. So there we are. That's the list of the BS. That's 24 fees. 24 fees. And here, it's in the fine print. I'll hold it up.

You can see right there. There's all those hidden fees. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. Yeah, there it is. So, kudos to Kagananda in Fort Pierce. You really came up with one of the sneakiest, the stupidest, comical way to hide fees I've ever seen.

And there is no Kagan anymore. I mean, there is a Kagan, probably, but he sold out a long time ago. At any rate, that's where we go. We called up Agent Thunder to investigate, and we'll get into the report now. my first impression of Gagan Honda was a good one. I had a showroom and spoke with a receptionist who was wearing a mask.

That's good. She called a salesperson for me who was also wearing a mask. If you listen to this show regularly, this is very unusual. In two-thirds of the dealerships we shop, nobody wears a mask. Just about everyone was wearing a mask. Just one or two were wearing theirs improperly around their necks. it was a major improvement over the last week's shop. So, kudos.

You know, we're laughing at you on the hidden fees. We're patting you back on the mask. Congratulations. My salesman's name was Jeffrey. They should charge a mask fee. A mask fee. They should have a mask fee. Particularly if they provided masks, they should say, yeah.

We're going to charge you for your mask. There are, that's happening in restaurants. There's COVID fees. I'm not kidding. We're seeing this thing, though. Yeah. Not just car dealers. Jeffrey was my salesman.

discarded me to a desk and asked how he could help. I said I was there to do the legwork for my mother who needed a new car. She didn't feel safe entering out in the world yet. I said we began by playing around with her online buying feature, ended up having questions I couldn't find answers for online. I also was itching to get out,

this is my excuse, you know, my cover. It should get out of the house, while I decided to make the trip to the dealership. We spoke for a long time about the Honda Corps. Jeffrey asked me about what sort of things she would like to have in a new car, what color, et cetera. We picked out a silver accord, LX1.5T, MSRP 24975, the same one that I looked at online. Jeffrey suggested that we go outside and look at the car. I told him I wanted to clear up some questions first.

Jeffrey said, shoot, I asked, what was an advanced replacement fee? Jeffrey looked confused I told him it was a fee I saw on the listing on the online listing before he could answer I continued I like all of those fees

broken down and explained I've never seen so many what is a frivis we said we told him I go ask him about the fris I got to know what frivolous IVIS how much was that a dollar

something like that something like that he didn't know Jeffrey did know he said the dealership doesn't make up those fees. Now, that's a lie. I guarantee you, they made up frivis.

And how about the, what was the other one? The emergency medical fee, law enforcement radio fee. They made up all these fees. He says, we don't make up fees. The state charges them, oh, man. What state? Liar, liar, pants on fire. Kazakhstan.

I mean. Kazakhstan charges it. Your nose is growing, Jeffrey. Your nose is growing. You are a liar. He said that when they build the price of a car, When they build the price of a car, they just show them. I was confused.

Jeffrey went on and explained that the only real fees being charged are things like new plate fee, registration, and dealer fee. I asked them if these would appear on my official purchase order when I signed in. He said these would just be worked into the price of the car and not appear his itemized fees. I asked him to explain the $799 pre-delivery service fee. Jeffrey said that it was to cover the cost of prepping the car and everything else that goes into processing the deal. He assured me that it was a standard fee that dealerships charged.

When we were done discussing the fees, Jeffrey made a copy of my driver's license and found the keys to the accord. Now, of course, we all know that the pre-delivery service fee of $7.99, the dealers are all compensated by the manufacturers for preparing the car for the delivery. They already get paid. The dealer, it's profit to the dealer. If this is a Honda, it is. Honda pays him to prepare that car for you when you buy it. And now he's charging you $799 again, and he's been paying twice. You pay him once, Honda pays him.

We walked around the car. I noticed there was an addendum, here we go, next to the Moroni label, that listed $798 in added dealer options, including a premium package, pinstripe, wheel locks, trunk tray, I'm not sure what that is, and splash cars. We drove the car, Jeffrey asked me how I liked it a couple of times, but remained mostly silent.

We returned to write it up. Jeffrey showed me a detailed worksheet, explained the price. He started with a $1,18 discount off MSRP. Then he added several of the items from the addendum, $74 for the wheel locks, $141 for splash cards, $124 for a cargo tray, and $60 for pinstripes. The actual cost of the dealer on those is peanuts, and that's probably a 700% markup for these addendum items. I asked them if you would take those off.

I said my mom wouldn't be interested in anything like that. Jeffrey said that since they were, here we go, already installed. that's the game folks we call pre-installed dealer options they do that so they can hold your feet to the fire and charge you overcharge you for these

items that you don't want or just use it in the negotiation fine we'll take off the splash guards for you thinking you're saving money but you're now you're just a little bit closer to MSRP exactly but they say I'm sorry we already installed those if you get in a situation like this instead

argument you say I'm not going to take him with those items on there find me another car dealer trade another car or even though you really don't want to do that it won't do that say I'll order one without the splash guards and the wheel locks and the pinstripes and the cargo tray order me one without that so you that's your that's your defense shouldn't have to be but that's one way to try to get out of that kind of crap then he added a hundred and five dollars and taxable fees taxable fees by the way code for hidden fees, $799 pre-delivery service charge, that's also a taxable fee, sales tax

and $427 in non-tax fees, if they're not-taxed, then they are government fees. Out the door, I was at $26,592, $26,592. I asked him if I could take the worksheet, and he handed it to me with no argument. I stood up, thanked him, headed for the door. Before I could exit, a sales manager ran up and stopped me. He wanted to know how my experience had been, and he was looking forward to earning my business. They don't like to say, I'm looking forward to selling you a car.

We don't like to sell cars. We like to earn your business. You earn my business by not charging me the frivice. Yeah. So, here we go. The discussion with all the street speaks for itself under BS, the outdoor price that Jeffrey gave agent Thunder was $877 higher than the out of the door price for the same vehicle on Kagan's website. So that tells you what's going on, the Kaga Honda and Fort Pierce.

And it's time for votes. Online we're seeing F's. And it gives them a huge fat F. You know, gosh, this is a tough one. This is a tough one. It's extraordinary with the fees, but it is typically. in line. I'd say on the curve a D. I don't know what to say

about him. It's tough. I think what happens is we get, I know I do, I get emotionally involved and I get angry at the dealer and then I realize that I get angry at most dealers and if we don't have enough dealers out there listed on our recommended list, where you're going to buy a car? They get an A for the mask. They get an A for COVID.

Yeah, that really gave me, it made me warm and fuzzy there. I can't wait to see the turnaround, as I predicted at the beginning of the show, since we have been, began to beat up the dealers on not wearing their masks, in other words, not having the salespeople wear the mask, you're going to see more and more car dealerships say, hey, this is cost of this business.

They're not ashamed. They're just afraid they're going to lose business. And you will lose business. I mean, I know a lot of people, and I don't know anybody. People talk to me about other retail stores We had somebody the other day that went into, was at Home Depot or one of the Home Depot, and nobody was wearing masks in there. And they said, I won't go back in there.

If you're a normal person, especially if you're in Florida, which where the COVID-19 is running higher and higher, it's scary. And if you cartilers out there will get smart and take the precautions for your customers and your employees. you'll solve more cars. John in California gives them a big fat F for all those fees. Jonathan and Wellington gives them an F as usual. Amory gives them an F for the fees, but an A for creativity on the fee names.

Okay. I've got Frank with an F, Mr. Hand with an F, but at least no fee for the other fees. Mark Smith with a D-minus. And Donovan with an F, Boris F, Karen, F, Mark Ryan, F,

Eric, D-minus, Mark Anderson says $2 fee for my F, E.C. Olson with an F, and Wayne with an F. We've got to go with what the people want. The people want to fail them. There you go. I don't know. I got an answer. I'm going to give them an A for the mask, and I'm going to give them an F for the fees.

And I'm also going to remind our listeners, get in touch with the Attorney General. Please, Ashley Moody, and voice your opinion on all these fees. to get control on this give her a call 850 4143300 you know i think again i have to say i'm like stew and and some others i'll do a d minus on that i we're harping so much on these masks and i know we're not supposed to give them credit or not i would just feel bad because there's so few car dealers that are abiding. That affects my decision. And the other thing is, they're not much worse than a lot of dealers out there. I think we've got to let them squeak by. I agree with the creativity on the dealer fee. They really brought that to a new level of expertise and deception.

And it gave me a good laugh. Maybe because we had a good laugh, we'll let them squeak by. But we will be back, Cog and Honda in Fort Pierce. We will be back, and we might not be so generous next time. That's right. Okay, where are we now? We got any text on me? Jonathan, I think we got about two minutes left. Okay.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to thank all of you for tuning in to Erlon cars. We definitely appreciate your company. You're an important part of the show. Stay tuned next week. Same time, same station, and be safe. and wear your mask.