Earl Stewart on Cars - 07.02.2022 - Your Calls, Texts, and Mystery Shop of Mike Erdman Nissan of Cocoa Beach

Episode Date: July 2, 2022

Earl and his team answer various caller questions and responds to incoming text messages. Earl’s female mystery shopper, Agent Lightning travels north to visit a local Nissan dealer to see what they have on the lot and how much over sticker they will charge for a new 2022 Nissan Rogue Sport SUV. Earl Stewart is the owner of Earl Stewart Toyota in North Palm Beach, Florida, one of the largest Toyota dealerships in the southeastern U.S. He is also a consumer advocate who shares his knowledge spanning 50+ years about the car industry through a weekly newspaper column and radio show. Each week Earl provides his audience with valuable tips that prevent them from "getting ripped off by a car dealer". Earl has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, Business Week, and other major publications. He has also made numerous appearances on CNN, Fox News, CBS, and other news networks. He is frequently called upon by local and national media to comment on major trends and newsworthy events occurring in today’s rapidly changing auto industry. You can learn more by going to Earl's videos on www.youtube.com/earloncars, subscribing to his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/earloncars, his tweets at www.twitter.com/earloncars, and reading his blog posts at www.earloncars.com. Sign up to become one of Earl's Vigilantes and help others in your community to avoid getting ripped off by a car dealer. Go to www.earlsvigilantes.com for more information. “Disclosure: Earl Stewart is a Toyota dealer and directly and indirectly competes with the subjects of the Mystery Shopping Reports. He honestly and accurately reports the experiences of the shoppers and does not influence their findings. As a matter of fact, based on the results of the many Mystery Shopping Reports he has conducted, there are more dealers on the Recommended Dealer List than on the Not Recommended List he maintains on www.GoodDealerBadDealerList.com”

Good morning. I'm Earl Stewart. I welcome you to Earl Stewart on Cars, a live talk show all about how to buy, lease, maintain, or repair your car without being ripped off by a car dealer. With me in the studio is Nancy Stewart, my wife, co-host, and a strong consumer advocate, especially for our female listeners. 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 LinkedIn cyber. space through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Periscope. Stu is also the Spymaster Director of our Mystery Shopping Report. He dispatches our secret shopper weekly to an unsuspecting South Florida dealership.

And now, on with the show. Good morning, everybody. We're back again, right here live in the studio in North Palm Beach, Florida. And I should have the United States of America because we're everywhere. We stream, we stream Facebook and Pariscope and YouTube. you heard that and they recorded introduction we're having a our shows are you know pardon me for patting ourselves on the back here but i think our shows are more exciting than ever before we're in a period of history uh with not just the automobile business but with the world

and supply and demand and manufacturing and uh the covid pandemic has precipitated some things around the globe i don't need to tell you you can't do anything but watch news these days it's on the news daily and every now and then you wake up and you say what what where am I living what's going on my life has changed on my habits have changed my work has changed my economics have changed and there's nothing changed more than buying or leasing an automobile new or used it's just a bizarre experience if you if you haven't bought a car in five years and if you've been asleep for five years and you haven't read the newspaper,

and you walked into a car dealership today, you would think you are on a different planet because cars aren't being sold like they used to, not that it was a good way to buy them before. Right now it's a seller's market. And if you're going out there to a car dealership, by the way, the same thing applies for maintaining or repairing your car. Everything is different than it was five years ago or four years ago.

if you listen, and a lot of the people that listen to this show, we have a lot of regulars, and we tend to attract a higher intelligentsia. We seem to have a lot of educated, sophisticated consumers out there. That's the reason

we love the phone calls, because the phone calls add immeasurably to this show, suggestions, recommendations, corrections, and we'd love to hear from you. So we need to spread the word. By we, I mean, you and us on this show to your friends, to your less sophisticated, so to speak.

You know, when you walk into a car dealership and you're going to buy a 40 or 50 or 60,000 product, that's the second largest purchase most people ever make in their life. And they make it oftentimes an impulse, emotion, without being fully educated. So you need some help. And your friends out there that are listening, that are, as I say, maybe they're a little older, maybe they're first-time buyers, maybe English is their first language. You can imagine yourself being in the Dominican Republic

trying to buy a car and you don't speak Spanish. I mean, it's the same sort of thing I'm talking about. So all these people that are victimized, help them out. We even have a little club, or I don't know what you want to call it. We call it our posse. I'm holding up as you're streaming this online. Little hat, it's a free hat that we'll give you if you join. Earl's vigilantes. That's right.

Vigilantes are specially prepared and educated and open to others to help them and purchase, lease, maintain, or repair the car. So we have a lot of vigilantes out there listening. We'd like more vigilantes to join the club, and we'll talk about it later in the show

and tell you how to do it. Nancy Stewart, Mikeos, sitting to my left here. We'll give you that information. I've got to give out the phone numbers because even though a lot of you know that by heart or have it written down at least, if you don't and you're a first-time listener or if you listen and you just have written the number down, I'd love for you to get a pencil and write it down.

This is our toll-free, old-fashioned telephone number. 877-960-9960. Again, that's 877-960-960. 960. We love phone calls. I know they're old-fashioned. A lot of you don't even use a telephone anymore. Everything's texting, it's posting, you know, Spotify's music, isn't it? It's, you know, you know what I'm talking about. High tech. But the phone still, I think even in you, if you're high tech, you got to admit the telephone conveys more. Personality, emotion, sincerity, lack of sincerity.

When you're on the phone with somebody, you get a certain something that you don't get with a text or an email. Or a posting. So we'd love to you to call the show. We will prioritize your phone call. We have a limited number of lines coming

in to the show. And we avoid having them stack up because we don't want you to wait. A lot of you haven't got the time, especially if you're driving. And you just want to get on the phone. Say what you have to say. So, Nancy Stewart, she's watching the iPad in front of her, not her iPad.

She's watching her laptop. She's watching her iPad too, or her iPhone. And we watch for a note of a phone call. We see your name and that you're holding, and we stop what we're doing during the show. If I'm yacking or Rick's yacken or Stu or whoever is talking, we stop and go to the phone. That way, we take your phone calls because they're very valuable to us. If you can't call us at 877-960-960, then text us at 772-497-60. I like that second most.

I text. I don't call unless I really have to. In fact, if I'm going to call somebody, I usually say, I text them and say, can you call me? Or I say, when can I call you? That is less interrupted. But the show is different because we want to be interrupted. That's the most important part of the show are the phone calls that come. here. But again, you can text us at 772-4976530. Have a really cool contact that nobody

else uses. We get a lot of feedback and information from this contact. It's a URL. It's a web site you go to. It's called Your Anonymous Feedback.com. And it is just what it sounds like. It's an anonymous way to call the show. You type in what you want to say. You say anything you want. We don't know who you are, where you are. We cannot track you down. Kind of like the anonymous callers to the police department or, you know, a lot of people, or to the press. A lot of people, whistleblowers.

The tip line. The tip line. Yeah, tip line, exactly. Maybe we should have another one called Your Anonymous. That's too long. Anyway, we'll just call it Your Anonymous Feedback.com. You and your websites. Exactly.

If you will call us on that or type in your comment on the. that, we will air it, just like we do the text, and Stu keeps track of that, and he will get into the, we have the archives. We don't get to them right away. Phones priority, text, unanimous feedback comes second, but we get to them sooner or later. Sometimes we actually get to them the following week, but mostly we get to them the same day. We'll get to them this morning. So your anonymousfeedback.com, 772-4976530 for text, and of course, the good old-fashioned telephone, 877-960-99. Now, if you're dizzy from all those numbers,

I'm going to flip the mic to Nancy Stewart, my co-host. She's also co-founder of the show. She's also the female advocate for all you ladies out there. We love the ladies to call the show, and we get a lot of them. And some of our best feedback information comes from you ladies. So we want to maintain that parody. We like you guys.

you guys are great but the ladies have a little bit different slant on things they're a little bit different people if you haven't noticed nancy uh please take them i could tell them about your special offer and other stuff good morning everyone welcome to this fourth of july weekend well uh i love talking about free speech let your voice be heard whomever you are it just doesn't apply to women. And it's great to live in the United States of America, which brings me to Earl's latest blog, and that is open letter to Governor Ron DeSantis. Open letter to Governor Ron DeSantis. Earl's going to talk about this shortly, and it's definitely worth mentioning We have the freedom of speech in the United States of America,

and sometimes we don't always get a chance to voice our opinion. It's taken away from us every once in a great while. And this is one of those moments that I feel the need to mention it to our audience. Ladies, $50 to the first two new. Lady callers, $50. And Felicia, I missed your call last week. Please give us a call again this morning. Again, for the first two new lady callers, $50.

And you can call, as I always say, just to say hello. Let us know you're listening. Or maybe you want to share an experience you had, good or bad. Or, as I always used to say, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I want to take a moment to thank everyone for tuning in to Earl Stewart on cars. We enjoy your company. Give us a call, 877, 960, 9960, or you can text us at 772-497530, and don't forget, Your Anonymous Feedback.com.

You can say anything you want. Mm-hmm. It is the Fourth of July weekend. and take advantage. We should be able to take advantage of that amendment every single day of our lives. I can't emphasize that. Enough.

877-960-9960. Now back to the recovering car dealer. I usually talk about Rick Kearney right away because he's an integral part of the show. In fact, he's even more important than he ever was because now is not a good time to buy a car. Now is the time to maintain and repair your car and keep it going. We have a caller.

Yes, we do. George, thank you for waiting and welcome to Earl Stewart on cars. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. How are you? We're well, thank you. I just have what I think is a simple question,

and that's regarding ordering a vehicle and not having to pay for port installed, Is that possible? It is possible, especially if it's just a straight order, but the difficulty comes sometimes in trading cars. So if a car has already been work ordered, and in other words, each dealer gets an allocation. The question was, can you order a car? I don't think he meant to buy one from stock. Oh, yeah, you can order one, but even sometimes fulfilling that, you can get the car exactly what you want,

but sometimes cars become available sooner. That might be, that can come in. But if you say, I want no poor accessories at all, you can get no port accessories at all. you can get no port of accessories at all okay I guess that was that was a simple question and I appreciate that George are you talking about a Toyota yes yes sir I am yeah I had a feeling you were up and you're probably also talking about Toyo Guard and our dealership I'm sorry I'm only talking about our dealership most dealerships were probably forced you to take so here here's here's a here's a story George and most toy dealerships virtually all of them

we don't do this but they equip all of their vehicles with Toyagard. And that is a $699 package that's worth probably less than a third of that. We don't add it because we consider it not worth the value. But some dealerships do it 100%. What I suggest to you is you shop around and say, I want to order my new Toyota without the Toyo Guard package. And the one that says yes, then that's the one you deal with.

Okay. That's very informative. and I do appreciate your input on that. And that's basically what I plan on doing is ordering a car waiting 60 or 70 days and getting it without some of these port installed options that could run you up around $2,000. Exactly, yeah.

It's kind of unique to Toyota. I'm not sure about the other manufacturer, but Toyota is sold in the Southeast United States by a distributor, and he is a private distributor. he gets his cars from Toyota and then we get as a Toyota dealers get our cars from him so he's able to add stuff in the port that we don't think

in some cases is a value and Toyo Guard is one of those things All right well thank you very much You guys have a great 4th of July Be safe and enjoy your What is it? Kessler Oh boy I tell you That's a fun car to drive

Thanks George Please call again. Thank you, George. 877-960. And you can text us at 772-497-6530. We have Bill holding, and Bill is calling us from Jupiter. Good morning, Bill. Good morning.

I have a question about battery disposable. I understand that a pure electric car like a Tesla, eventually those batteries will wear out, and they'll need to be disposed of. How about a hybrid? Will those batteries ever wear out and will it be and will they need to be replaced? I'll hang up and listen on the radio. Thanks. The answer to your question is yes and yes. The batteries do eventually go bad on a hybrid just like any other battery will.

Hopefully they'll last most of the life of the car, a couple hundred thousand miles. And in that case then, those batteries are captured from the recycle yard and they are recycled. If they're replaced at a dealership, the batteries are sent back to Toyota and they're recycled by Toyota. Well, unless they're not a Toyota, they're sent back to Nissan. Right, right. Now, George, they're all sent to Toyota. Bill, I mean, Bill, there's a new technology now that is addressing that very issue. It's a huge issue when we get into all electric cars, and some people are forecasting, you know, 10 years.

I mean, this electric vehicle market is moving along a lot faster than anybody thought, and batteries are going to be a huge issue. And if you Google this, and I've looked at a little bit, in fact, I've even thought about investing some of these companies. Some of these companies are actually able to take these recyclable or batteries and not only dispose of them, but make a profit from the disposal. So technology is moving so fast today that the big problems that we see, the insurmountable problems, like you just mentioned with too many batteries polluting the planet, those problems will be, those problems will be solved, in my opinion. but it is a big issue right now. He hung up. Thanks, Bill.

No. He's listening on the radio for me. I forgot that. Thank you, Bill. That was a great question. Thanks for the help, bro. Thank you, Bill. It's great whenever sometimes someone will hang up that's called in and they're waiting for your answer.

And you give the answer. And they... Well, it allows us to an easier time for discussion as well. But, I mean, that actually brings up another issue as well for a recital. One of the biggest issues we have in this nation and around the world are old tires. And there are so many old tires sitting in dumps, millions of them, that a couple of places have actually had issues where they've caught fire and burned for months on end. You're talking to the guy with more old tires than anybody you know.

Exactly. But, however, we do have ours recycled responsibly, and such things as being ground down into rubber that could be used for, such things as mulch or used in playgrounds, safely used, and recycled properly. Yeah, we've looked into that a lot over the years. We probably have to look at it again, but I get depressed. We have a promotion in our dealership where we supply free tires to all of our customers that buy a Toyota from us.

And so we take off a whole lot of tires and we get this huge stack of tires. and we shopped around, Stu and I were making some calls. And the problem is the recycling plans are so far away from our location that the transportation costs don't generate enough revenue to have us break even on selling them tires

to the recycling place. I'm sure this will change. I mean, people are becoming more and more aware of the planet and aware of pollution and everything that we see now today is an insurmountable problem and you're exactly right you grind up a tire that makes a great road top and that's what they're using them for so we just have to see this sort of technology adapt to the problems and it'll happen over time and you know what rick there's more people who

really don't realize the benefits of recycling let's go back to your topic and that's tires there's a lot of people out there who don't realize what comes from a recycled tire the list is endless give us a call folks what do you think 877 960 9960 or you can text us at 772

4976530 we've caught up with our phone calls so I'll give it back to the recovering car dealer I was talking to Rick initially about the fact that he's especially important. Now, he can answer all your questions about the technology car. He's been with my dealership for over 25 years. So you go back 25 years, he had to get fully qualified to work on a car 25 years old. Today, he has to be fully qualified to work on a car that is like cyberspace

compared to what the stagecoach was where we were selling back in those days. So he's on top of everything. If you have a question, anything, symptoms, problems, you're nervous about your car, you're afraid to bring it in to a service department, and you're not sure if you have to have it fixed or not, you'd rather wait. It's important today because you should keep the car. I mean, it used to be, I feel like a new car, I feel like a late model certified car. I've been driving this car for four or five years.

It's time for me to change. Those days are over. If you buy a car today, because you just feel like it, you're paying probably a $5,000 premium. That's a round number. It could be a $10,000 or $3,000. You're paying thousands of dollars more today for a later model used car or a new car than you will shortly. I mean, I've been trying to forecast when this issue was going to catch up with itself. Demand is still so high.

Supply is still so low. We're not caught up yet. But if you can make that car you're driving, economically work, comfortably work, safely work for another year, do it. So if you're worried, then call Rick. And Rick is monitoring YouTube. If you want to be directly in contact with Rick, it's Earl on Cars. You know, YouTube.com for slash Roll on Cars. YouTube.com for slash Rollin Cars.

Rick will see your post, and he gets a bunch of posts on YouTube. Or you could just call, or you can just text any of the ways. But if you have an issue with your car, let Rick Kearney know. He's a certified master diagnostic technician. I've been a car dealer for over 50 years. Oh, that's a long time. And I have never had a better mechanic. He's a 4.5 years.

The guy is really, really good. So if you've got an audio file or a video file, that'd really be cool. If you could text it to us or email it to us, he can really get into the diagnosis there. But otherwise, just tell them what's your car. sounds like, smells like, looks like, describe the problem, and Rick will give you 99.9% accurate diagnosis. We also have our mystery shopping report coming up, and Stu Stewart, who spoke earlier is our spymaster general. Every week, every week, we send out an undercover agent. Our current undercover agent is codenamed Agent Lightning, and she's out of town. And when she goes out of town,

She goes out of town a lot, and she's able to mystery shop. She keeps working. Pretty wide, yeah, pretty wide geography. And we've been doing this for years and years. If you want to go Earlong Cars.com, click on Earlandars.com. You can click our archives. We've got mystery shop after a mystery shop. We have a recommended car dealer list based on the mystery shops,

and we have a do not buy from this dealer list based on the mystery shops. So, Stu, what's on your mind? mind today? Well, what was on my mind, I was driving in today, and I was just thinking how crazy it was that every Saturday for the last, well, for me it's been about 10 years, have been going every Saturday morning to do a radio show. And I just can't believe that I'm doing that. So I was thinking about that, I can't believe I do this. And I was thinking about when I started out, I was just doing some technical stuff, you know, getting some camera set up and everything, and kind of doing a little bit of what Jonathan does now. And, um, but, um, but, I'm,

Every once in I feel the courage to chime in and give my opinion. And eventually it became very natural. So it's kind of strange. I was just doing a little self-reflection. Are you like me? Do you learn something every week? Yeah. I mean, I...

Mainly from Rick. Yeah, me. The fact, you know, what we ought to do is somehow or other get our salespeople and our managers to sit down for half an hour with Rick or another one of our really good technicians and just chit-chat. Yeah. Because I learn stuff every day. about today's cars, yesterday's cars.

And so it's kind of cool. This is like an educational forum for Nancy Stu and me. That's right. And I really appreciate it. Also, the second, I learn also from the callers and the textures too. Because sometimes, and oftentimes it's in the form of a question that prompts us to think about something in a different way. That's what's really cool. I agree with that.

Most definitely, we learn a lot from our listeners, from our callers. everyone who chimes in and the staff here that we work with all of these guys that I work with it's just an amazing it's an amazing Saturday morning every Saturday morning and it's one different moment after another it's never the same it's not repetitious so that's what keeps us coming back every Saturday morning at 8 o'clock that Stu was reflecting on as he drove where does the time go okay back to the phones we're going to go to warren who's giving us a call from one of my favorite places new jersey good morning warren good morning guys how are you happy july fourth thank you uh i close with two reasons there's something that earl has said

one of the show helped save somebody i know about three thousand dollars her husband had a actuar and had a clutch and the clutch went on it and he took it to the Accura dealer, and he paid them the $100 or whatever to look at it, and they wanted $7,000 to fix it. And I said to him, he tried regular mechanics, but they couldn't get the part. I said, go to a Honda dealer. He went to the Honda dealer, and they did it for half the amount, at $3,500. Wow.

He said they can get the card in a week, and they did it for exactly half, and what was good was he, as I think Rick had told me with my car, He paid the accurate deal of the 100 or whatever it was to do the whole, you know, observation of what was wrong with. They gave him a written estimate and everything. All he had to do is handed to the Honda dealer. And the guy said, looked at it right away. He said, I could do that for 3,500. And I'll get the part in a week.

So your information can be very helpful sometimes. Well, thank you, Warren. You know, I think sometimes are a little bit too hard on the dealers. The dealers are technicians are better trained. They have to be. they're required to get schooling because you've got to do that to keep up with the technology and the dealers, I'm a dealer,

they make me buy everything they tell me I've got to buy in terms of diagnostic. I'm talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in diagnostic machinery. A lot of these smaller independent shops either can't afford to do that or they don't want to do that. They have their place

and in general your independent repair shops are less expensive. But Warren for a situation like you described, That's an expensive repair. And it's like anything else. Nancy and I, you know, we're getting a little older. And so, you know, we go to the doctor more often, and we've learned the hard way.

You get a second opinion, or maybe a third opinion. You know, if you need to get a second or third opinion from a doctor, what do you think you need to do from your car dealer or your independent mechanic? If you're looking at a $3,000 bill, sometimes just saying you're going to take it someplace else, else will lower the price. Oh, $3,000 for that. Okay, thank you very much. I believe I'll check with somebody else. And, oh, wait a minute. Let's take another look at that. I mean, if you just walk in and say, here's my checkbook, filling in the amount of the repair and fix it, you're going

to have a problem. But thanks very much, Warren, for that feedback. It makes me feel good that we helped. Yeah, and there's one more thing. I'll just give you quickly what happened about some of the lessons that learned from you. A friend of mine has the Honda, what's the small Honda? got the fit Honda fit The Civic? Yeah, the Civic I went really little.

He bought it too small. Anyway, he gets a letter from the dealer saying that they're willing to buy it back. I'll be quick about it or I'll go on the detail.

So anyway, I went with him to the Honda dealer and the Chalvin started in like how he owed $10,000 on the Civic, which he told him beforehand, which he shouldn't. But anyway,

he went to the whole thing. I made a long story shirt. The dealer kept telling him what his monthly thing for the accord would be over and over. So finally, when he was done, I asked him, I said, well, how much you're giving him for this civic? How much is the interest rate? Okay? And how much is the new car? And he would answer him. He would answer him on and on and on. He had the car, and he was going to give him monthly payment, on and on and he would not answer those three questions. And finally, my friend Jerry just got up and said, look, I had enough, and we left, and we talked about it. So that's what

they try to do. He was giving him a monthly payment. He said, oh, it doesn't work that way. So he would never tell us exactly what he's going to give for the civic, exactly what the interest rate was, or how much the new car was? We had no idea of any of those things. But he was just talking on and on me. He wouldn't stop. I just want to get your opinion on that. Well, that's probably where 75% of the cars are sold today. And unfortunately, people are susceptible, especially to the monthly payment. We all live on a budget. We look at our mortgage payment. We look at our light bill or water bill. We get our paycheck every month. Our life seems to rotate on a 30-month cycle. So you go into a car dealership,

the first thing they tell you is, how much can you afford a month? And then by manipulating all the variables, they can make one hell of a deal off that monthly payment, no matter what it is. Because if you have a high enough interest rate and long enough terms, you can buy a Rolls-Royce, for a lovely low monthly payment. So you've got to be careful and touch all the bases. No, it was really interesting because he refused to break it down. And finally, my friend Jerry said, look, I got a car outside. I don't need it by a car.

I mean, I like it. But I don't need. He said, I could wait a couple of months. I could wait, you know, because I'm not driving that much. You know, a car only 10,000 miles on him. He was two and a half years old. And, you know, he wanted that car in the worst. swag. And he just finally just said, okay, fine.

You know, we'll touch base in a couple months or something. And he says, I'm not going. I said, I'll just wait until I pay it down or whatever. There's my car. Again, and then I'm going. I don't need this car right now. But it's just funny how he would not give that information. You just figured he could

break him down and make the deal. So anyway, thank you for you. It's really, you know, I guess you're right, people just don't. Well, thank you, Warren. Thank you very much. I appreciate the call. and you're one of our bitter callers, please keep on calling. Yeah, thanks for your input.

Happy Fourth of July weekend. We are going to stay with the phones, and we have Phil holding from Jupiter. Good morning, Phil. Hey, how you doing, and happy fourth to you guys. Thank you. Yeah, I was just, I wanted to ask our old question. I remember last week you mentioned that you had a problem with your Tesla Model S, and I was just curious how it was one.

working through that work center in Ok Chobie. I mean, were you able to get that taken care of? Because I'm having a VIN number assigned to my model Y in two weeks. And I'm a little antsy about this whole situation with Tesla. So I just wonder if you give me some words of wisdom here about what you're going through. Well, I, you know, I was pretty hard on the Tesla dealership on Okachobi Boulevard. And Nancy and I had a really bad experience. Nancy wants to buy a Tesla, and by the time we got in and out of there, she was so angry, she says, forget about it.

So it's not good for business. I think service is not their strong suit, and I think that how to deal with customers who are having their car service is not their strong suit. But I also believe that partly because there's so little maintenance and repairs that are required on Teslas. Most everything, electric vehicles just require minuscule amount. The only thing you have to worry about, really, in terms of routine maintenance, is your tires, and you have an electronic notification of your tire issues anyways to tell you when to come in. So they need to brush you up. So my advice, you're going to buy a Tesla.

I say buy it. I think just be prepared, brush up on your email skills and your texting skills because it's very difficult to call them and get a human being the way we normally do with combustion engine cars and regular car dealer. So it's an amazing car. You'll love it. And that overcomes, in my opinion, the issues you're going to have in having it serviced. Okay.

Well, I'm glad you said that because you had you, you, going through this and I've talked to and I've talked to him just to get information about my order and everything. It's been difficult. I call the main number the line where you can get people and but it's hard to get anybody

to talk to you down at the Yokachobi works unless you get down there. And I'm and I've got a Pryas I'm used to dealing with you. You know what I mean? This is like day and night compared to I hate to lose the customer but if I were in your shoes I'd buy that Tesla

and you'll thank me for it later. And if you have any problems in the service department, we'll team up on them. And Phil, this is Nancy Stewart. To Earl's point, you know, I really have to point out that if you keep in mind that purchasing a vehicle is the most important thing that you can do at Tesla, and even then they drop the ball. But sales is their strong suit. service is not texting is not and it makes things well quite difficult complicated in this crazy world that we live in earl pointed pointed out about service and the fact that there's very little service on a Tesla shouldn't this be a positive for Tesla it's there's less maintenance on a Tesla so they

should be even doing a better job at keeping their customers happy. Because guess what? They're customers for life, not just for today. And Elon is doing a great job. I'm not taking that away from him. There's a lot of people that are very, very jealous of this man. And he's a genius and he knows what he's doing. My point, microchip. Who doesn't have a microchip? Who doesn't have a microchip shortage, Elon Musk. So, food for thought. Rick? Just to say this, 2024, Toyota's going to have an electric ton, Tacoma. Cool. Well, listen, Phil, thank you very much. I'm very excited about it. Thank you very much for the call, and good luck on the Tesla. And you call me when it comes in, and we'll share, compare notes. You can help me, and I can help you a little bit. And I'll let you know

whether I purchased that S. I'm keeping the Pris. I'm keeping that car for life. I'm never going to get rid of that. Great idea. That'll be your backup car. It's going to be more important. So anyway, well, thanks a lot.

Sure, thank. I appreciate it. Thanks for the info. Thank you. Okay, we finished up our phone calls. Who's next? Well, let's get to Anne Marie's text. She's got a great one waiting for us.

Let's see here. Anne Marie says, good morning. I hope that everyone has a safe and happy holiday. last Sunday, an Amtrak train hit a car at an unmarked crossing with no signals in rural California. Three people were killed. On Monday, an Amtrak train hit a dump truck at a public crossing with no lights or signals in Ben, Missouri. Four people died. South Florida's tri-rail and bright line trains have had more than their share of train versus car incidents

and train versus pedestrian incidents. What's going on there? It's marked crossings with the cars losing every time. no if your vehicle gets stuck on the tracks grab your phone if it's handy and get away as fast as possible then look for a blue and white sign at the crossing it's an emergency notification system sign that gives the emergency number for the train dispatcher and the u.s. Department of transportation crossing number to the dispatcher so they can warn the train so if they can warn a train so if you see it's blocked you can get to a special repeat that if you're at a cross uh at a train crossing and you're stuck on the tracks or something else is blocking the tracks If you look for a blue and white sign at the crossing, it's an emergency notification system sign, and it gives the emergency number for the train dispatcher and the U.S. Department of Transportation crossing number.

So the dispatcher can warn trains that the crossing is blocked. Ann Marie, I love you. I never knew that in my entire 50s. Thank you, Ann Marie. What great information. You didn't know that, yeah. I did not know that. Okay, that's great.

I mean, I think people would, like, instinctively call 911, but this will get directly to the Department transportation and the dispatcher not for that train. Anne-Marie, thanks for mentioning those signs. I have to agree with you, and yes, this is to Anne-Marie's text. Anne-Marie, how many people get to that cross-road? How many people read any of the signs that are there? There's more than just that little blue sign or medium-sized, whatever it is. My point is, please, do not stop on-trial.

Well, they don't say, please, but do not stop on tracks. Stop here on red. Nobody pays attention to it. Nobody pays attention to it. Thank you for your text, the first part of it anyway. Now back to Stu. So hopefully there's no time to, there's time to relay the message. So the answer to be avoided.

So, of course, yeah. Anyway, back in the 1800s, trains had cowcatchers that attached in front of the locomotive. Since so many vehicles keep getting hit by trains, could they create sort of a car catcher onto the front of the locomotives maybe like a snowpaw to push vehicles out of the way? Well, I just want to chime in here because I looked up

cowcatchers, I knew what they are. That's a little attachment that goes on the front of the old-fashioned locomotives. And I wondered, were they ever used to move cows? And so I looked up, no, that's just a clever term, but the point of those were to actually help the train, not what they hit.

It was to keep trains from derailing. So even a car catcher would still mess up the car pretty bad, but at least the trail wouldn't derail and have a bigger disaster. Interesting. So, you know, this is not an area of expertise, but it's definitely an area of relevance with the car biz and just cars in general. And once again, we were talking about what we learned every Saturday, and the number to call the dispatcher is something new to me.

So I hope a lot of people are listening. Great information. My thought when we were first part of our text is, again, we're talking about an issue that is based on 20th century or maybe even 19th century technology. Train crossings, you know, these big long arms that take forever to go down and go up. Sometimes they go down and won't go up again. And it's just old technology. With the technology we have available today is all it takes to someone to address the issue. uh there are every car uh could be located by every train and every train could be located by

every car i mean we could have we have caution lights and warning lights why wouldn't we have a caution light uh train crossing yeah you have real time information stop uh blah blah i mean you can communicate between trains and every car on the road apple could do this tomorrow yeah they could get information on on train from the department of transportation and put it on our map Exactly. The terrorists might use that. Exactly. Apple could have done it yesterday.

It takes somebody in the government to direct the problem to free enterprise, because free government can't do anything, but they can tell free enterprise, this is what we want you to do, and you get paid for it, and you will make a profit as a result of it, and in a few months you will have people fighting each other for the best solution to the problem. but Anne-Marie, once again, you're a genius. Your text are just absolutely fantastic. You've got to do a book, Anne-Marie's text, to her own cars. They're all stored here.

I haven't been in the computer. I haven't lost anything. It will compete with your book. Thanks for being part of the show, Anne-Marie. All right, so we have another text here. This is interesting. Just listening to your show, my dad said he remembered hearing you in Cambridge in the 60s. Is this true?

And he forgot your name. Weren't you at Harvard in 1962? No, no. I'm kidding. I know you weren't. No, that's, he might be, he's mistaken there. I don't believe that you spent any time in Massachusetts or Cambridge. Actually, I went to Harvard.

I mean, I tried to go to Harvard. You visited Harvard. And I visited the campus, but I never, they turned me down. I got rejected. Well, possibly, to answer your question, while he was touring Harvard with his father, you might have overheard him in a hallway or across. the quad, but no, he didn't do any radio back in the 60s or anything like that. Let's jump over to anonymous feedback unless we have any phone calls.

We do. We do. Back to Nancy. Let's go back to the phones. We're going to talk to John from Palm City. Good morning, John. Happy Fourth of July. Well, same to you guys.

Nancy Stewart's point about Tesla, no problems about the chip shortage. But it's the chip shortage that's actually caused General Motors in the last second quarter, for the delivery of U.S. cars, they're down 15% from the year before, Toyota, 23% for the last quarter compared to the previous year. So, Nancy's point, Tesla can do their homework, and they know enough how to handle this problem, but companies like GM can't handle it. It's pathetic. Incidentally, according to the Cox Automotive Market Market, research firm. The average car in the United States is $47,148. That's up $5,000 from the previous year.

The average car payment is $100 more than it was the year before. And also, the car's prices are on an average $3,000 above the MSRP. That's according to Cox Automotive Market Research. Yeah, that was an interesting article, John, that I read this morning in the New York Times and especially the numbers that they mentioned this morning. And they talk about Americans not even making that much a year that they're paying for a vehicle. And the average car payment, $700 or more. And there's so much other information in that article. and it was really great that they just zeroed in on all of the information that the consumer like you and I would be very interested in comparing numbers of Toyota, GM, and Honda, and where they are today as far as car purchases and where they were a year ago.

And it's not on the incline, it's on the decline. Well, Nancy's point about Tesla again, not they're already so far ahead on everything. You take a company like General Motors. They failed in the past. They had an electric vehicle. They wouldn't even sell it to people. Earl was familiar with that when it came out. There were small little cars.

They leased them to people. They wouldn't sell them to people. And they took every one of them back because they were duds. I think only one or two has survived. They scrapped them. They were totally destroyed. They just can't put their rack together. The new Chevy Volt, they reduced it $6,000.

I mean, companies like General Motors, which is like the top, top company for years, they just can't put it together. It's unbelievable. And that's why a company like Tesla will be successful forever, it looks like to me. Nobody's going to take their technology away from them. Not at all. And they are the leader now, and it will always be the leader. I can see it.

This is true. Very true. Well, thank you, John. That's very well said. Thank you, guys. Happy July 4th. Happy 4th. Thank you, John. Yeah, one issue on one thing, John mentioned, that's interesting to me with the microchip shortage and why this didn't affect Tesla like it did everybody else.

What Elon Musk did, and I just learned this fairly recently, We knew that the shortage didn't affect the production of the Tesla. One of the things that he did, he anticipated, at the time COVID first happened, and he looked at his suppliers, but he just didn't look at his suppliers. He looked at his suppliers, suppliers, suppliers, and the supplier, suppliers, suppliers. In other words, you know, if you're furnishing any component of a car to a manufacturer, that component has to have suppliers to build the components. And if you don't look down the line far enough, you can have a really, really good supplier.

It's very reliable, never missed an order, always delivered on time. But he's got one guy out there that doesn't, and he goes out of business. So one little microchip can make your supplier or your supplier's supplier go down. So this is what Elon Musk said. He went down the chain of his suppliers, and he secured. backups in dual and triple. He had every one of his suppliers, he had multiple suppliers for the component,

and then he had multiple suppliers for the suppliers. So, I mean, that is why. And now, ironically, they're selling so many Teslas, that, you know, the order time is, you've got to wait even longer for a Tesla. And it's, but that's a good problem. It's not because of microchips, just because you can't build the car.

fast enough. Good point. I think we ought to build some factories right here in the good old United States. Yeah, that's a good point. Happy Fourth of July, everyone. They're trying to do that. And if you want to speak to your congressman, there's a bill in Congress right now that would it would encourage and incentivize U.S. chip manufacturers to build more chips, to build more plants, also encourage new chip manufacturers to come to America. And it's going to cost the taxpayers some money. It would be a subsidy to some extent.

But the problem is you can't be relying on Russia and China and the Ukraine for critical microchips. And they can't get the bill through Congress. It's just sitting there. They have more important things to worry about in Congress, apparently. And another thing, too, you know, some of the cars that are coming in, they don't even have the, you know, safety features on the vehicles, you know, that the consumer ordered.

I would quote, unquote, one of the vehicles that they mentioned in New York Times, but it escapes me at this moment. but it is a huge problem at any rate ladies and gentlemen voice your opinion what do you think about everything that we've talked about so far this morning give us a call tool free at 877 960 9960 and ladies don't forget voice your opinion give us a call 50 dollars for the first two female callers we're going to go we're going to stay with the phones and we're going to go Excuse me, Rick, go ahead. I was just going to say, I got one quick YouTube, but we go to phones first.

Thank you. We're going to go to Ann, who's calling from Jupiter. Thanks for your patience, Ann. Well, thank you, and happy Fourth of July to you both. Thank you. And this is a follow-up call for you. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I had spoke about three months ago.

I had my 2018 Hyundai Sonata was peeling. The roof, the paint was all. appealing. And I went back and forth with Napleton, and I even got in touch with the manufacturer, Honda manufacturer directly. I had a case number. They all said, no, no, it's a year out of warranty. We're not going to help you. We're not going to. And I had a good friend that suggested I call you, and I called you, and I want you to know two days later, they took care of it. Yay.

Wow. Great news, Ian. You just made all four of us smile. I'm thanking Hyundai, and I'm also thanking you for helping all of us out here. Thank you so much, Ian. Thanks for letting us know. Thanks for the follow-up call. What finally did it?

We got them to help you. Yes, you did. You did. It was funny because I had a case number and everything with the manufacturer, and they said, no, no. Don't call us anymore. they were tired of hearing it up from me. And after I conversation with you

and you suggested a couple good things for somebody out there to help me, I got a call and they took care of it. Very good. That's fantastic. Perseverance. Knowledge is power. Thank you, Ann. Have a wonderful weekend. And that makes me feel especially good

because, you know, you wonder, maybe I'm just feeling too full of ourselves here, but I think we are one of the only media outlets that tells it like it is. And we reach out quite a bit. And I think a lot of businesses, dealers, I think are very aware of us. And I say sometimes almost half jokingly, but we should say more often, just say that we talk to Roland Cars and we talk to Nancy Stewart or Rick Kearney or Stu or Earl. And they said to do this,

the impact to a lot of dealers or anywhere would be we don't need to have negative publicity and we talk about it, we name names, we mystery shop and we talk about what really happens so all of you listening out there, especially if you're in Florida, feel free to use our name.

I mean, I hate to say threaten, but say, listen, I think you're doing the wrong thing and I'm going to call Earl on Cars next Saturday at about 8.30 in the morning or whatever and I'm going to tell him the whole story and we'll see what he has to say and what his, I don't know how many listeners we have. If you look at Facebook, YouTube,

and the whole nine yards, we probably have hundreds of thousands of people out there that are listening or watching and who wants that kind of negative publicity? So use our name if you have an issue with a car dealer and call the show and tell us about it. I want to get back to the... Thank you, Ann.

Our number here is 877-9-6-9-6-0-9-60. Don't forget, ladies, $50 for the first two new lady-callers. And I'm going to get back to the microchip shortage in the article that I was reading in the New York Times. And what I failed to mention earlier, did you know at times automakers have dropped some features from vehicles because or their suppliers didn't have the chips they require for instance here's an example Honda has shipped vehicles without advanced parking sensors let's go one better Volkswagen has produced models that don't have blind spot monitors that the vehicles would have normally folks keep an eye on

on which you have ordered, how it arrives, and it's important to your safety. 877-960-99-60, or you can text us. Well, it wouldn't that be something if you bought a car without the sensors and your previous car had the sensors and the salesman forgot to tell you that your car didn't have the sensors? I can see me running into the door in the garage. Absolutely. Or worse.

That's scary. Ending up in the kitchen. Okay, ladies and gentlemen. We are going to get back to Rick and Stu, and Rick's got some YouTube's, right? One quick one here from Richard. He says, what is your take on a car buying info service called YAA? We love it. Great question.

We're members. We're paying members, and we recommend it. I don't have the website written down in front of me, but. YAAA.a.org. Oh, fantastic. YAA. Thanks, Jonathan.org. It's a father and son company, and the father has a wealth of hands-on automobile experience.

And his son approached him three or four years ago and said, hey, dad, let's do a consumer advocacy, I say, show. It's online. They do a lot of YouTube and a lot of videos. They have a big membership, a big following, and you can go online, look up a dealer, find out with the YAA. Is it your auto advocate? Is that what it is? Your auto advocate, Y.A.A. And you can get a kind of a report card on dealers in your area. We've worked with them. Nancy is on their female advisory board and one of the owners hauled the show about a month

ago. So we highly recommend yAA.org. Is that correct? And they have a wealth of information. It's just an amazing, and you'll definitely benefit by going to yAA.org. We are going to go to Chuck, who's calling us from Stillwater, Oklahoma. Good morning, Chuck. Good morning. Stillwater, Oklahoma?

Actually, still well. Everybody thinks Stillwater. That's where the Oklahoma Cowboys football team is from, I think. Actually, we're still well near Fayetteville, Arkansas, the strawberry capital of America. Oh, boy, strawberries. Well, how Stillwell? Stillwell is about 5,000 population. Actually, we're famous for the Cherokee Nation.

We're right in the middle of the Cherokee Nation. Oh, how exciting. Yeah, it's nice. I grew up near Chicago, three-generation steelworkers. lived in big city Houston and Indianapolis many years a brother was in

General Motors all his life so we've got a lot of car guys and also I worked near the Indianapolis 500 for 13 years so I got really interested in all the cars and whatnot and I love watching your show it's very informative

thank you kind of what I was calling about is I watched a program on PBS last week I'm the Tesla's and the autonomous driving. And so my question was, I remember you saying that you had to get a rating in order to go into autonomous driving? Yeah, they're testing the drivers, and they're also testing their own employees.

They recently lowered the score that you had to, you have to drive 30 days previously. You had to drive 30 days and get a 100 perfect score. And the computer built into the car monitors everything you do, and they measure your safety. I got up to 99. I just slipped to 98, but I found out the other day that they are thinking about lowering it to 95.

So, yeah, it's, once I get the full autonomy turned on, it'll be a lot of fun and be very helpful. I'm glad you mentioned that because I'm 81 years old, Nancy's, 80. My driver's license, my Florida driver's license needs to be renewed in two years. Every old person thinks about driving and it's, you know, they call them sometimes their cars, their freedom machines. They're very important to people, especially elderly people. And I think all the time about, you know, if I'm lucky and I live long enough, they're going to tell me I can't

drive anymore. And I'm thinking, boy, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could have fully autonomous safe cars in time for me to enjoy it and for Nancy to enjoy it and we would be able to actually use our freedom machines and get in our car and go to Publix the grocery store and go to the doctor's office or go to the Walgreens or CVS, go to the movies or wherever we want to go. Hop in the car, take me to Publix and Tequesta, Florida. And it would do that. Now we would say, take me home. That way, hopefully, they would be safe enough and be affordable enough that everyone could continue to drive for as long as they lived.

Were you able to see the PBS show at all? No, I'm sorry. I'm going to try to catch you a video on that. That sounds very interesting. What date to the air? It was fantastic. Uber's putting up big money because they want to go to all autonomous. Uh-huh.

And other organizations, of course, all the universities have been studying this for many years. They have a contest they run for quite a few years now where they have, oh, I forget it's out in the desert somewhere or whatever. And they have like all the universities and places that are working on this technology. They have a contest, like about 25 vehicles. We have to go through a course. And then whoever wins it, you know, gets the prize and whatnot to do more research. Right, that program was actually started by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects of America. It's a government agency that challenged all the colleges and universities to come out and compete for their prize.

Absolutely, because the military made the, they had the first autonomous driving vehicles in the military. And Chuck, did you say that was last weekend? It was just like a week ago. it hadn't been that many days I just happened to flip on PBS and I'm like this is really interesting so I put out my DVR and taped everything but

what I was going to ask you because what they said was that Tesla had that autonomous driving on the highway because the cars have to be going in the same direction for it to kind of work good and they didn't really want you use it

are you able to use it on your regular streets in your town? Well when they turn it I will and it's I I hadn't heard that about the same way I think the fully autonomous is pretty much fully autonomous it's you have to be on in the driver's seat prepared to take over because it's it hasn't been perfected obviously and Tesla's have had a number of accidents and some deaths when the car was in the fully autonomous mode so it's a working process but it's moving very rapidly and if I

qualify, and hopefully I will when they lower the score to 95, I will be very, very careful, and I'm not going to trust it. I'm not going to be in the back seat, reading the newspaper while they take me to the grocery store. I'll be right there ready to grab the wheel and hit the brake that I have to. So, yeah, but I, the way technology is moving, I think in a couple of years, I think they will have an autonomous car that's safer than a human driver. It'll never be perfect But I think Look at human drivers I mean they're texting

They're drinking coffee Yeah So if you are on full autonomy It won't be perfect And there will be accidents and deaths But far fewer They'll we see with human beings Absolutely

Absolutely Well I don't want to take up too much of your time And I really enjoy your show And I try to spread the word to all my friends Well thanks Chuck I appreciate it Oklahoma I tell you Every time I hear it I want to burst in the song

Well, you know what, I mean, thinking, too, I grew up near Chicago, and when I was a kid, we'd go up to Chicago to do or whatever we did, and it was like driving in a demolition derby. Tell me about it. I know Miami, Los Angeles, all the big towns. In fact, where we live now is, yeah, I'm only fully aware of how crazy drivers are since I've been trying to get my score up to 100. and I mean before I was a crazy driver so you know crazy driver just accepts all the other crazy

driver so now I'm trying to be a responsible driver and I'm telling you I'm maybe one percent of the road cars on the road drive carefully you know we ought to do they ought to they ought to like offers to all cars and have some big incentive like you win a vacation if you get a hundred score for a year great idea great idea well see I drove the 8094 from area Indiana to And that was pretty crazy. But we get business down in Palm Beach, Florida. So we would go down there quite often. And finally, I took my wife because she hadn't been to Miami Beach.

I said, well, let's go down to Miami Beach. The yacht shows going on. So we rented a car and drove down to Miami Beach. What is that, I-95? Oh, yeah. I've never seen people drive that fast and that crazy in my life. And I've been all over America. It's fun down here.

You've got to keep your crazy hat on when you hit that way. Chuck, thanks a lot. Please call again, will you? Absolutely. Thank you. Thanks. Have a nice day. Have a great 4th of July.

For those of us who grew up, learned to drive down here, I think we have a special, you know, we hold a special, you know, ability, a special place in the driving world. Well, what you have to do, and this is the problem. I think what you mean is seasoned. You're a seasoned driver. When you're on the road, you have to be aggressive. and because everybody else was aggressive. You taught me how to be. And if you have a schedule and if you have to be somewhere

and you leave in time, you'll want to get there in time. And so you have to drive unsafely to get where you're going. Well, with the advent of like maps, like Apple Maps and things like that, my aggressive driving has been cut eliminated because now I leave at the right time and I know exactly how long it's going to take me to get where I'm going. Well, you were in the 90s when you had your Tesla. I mean, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was, no, I wasn't in the 90s.

No, 87 was my top score, I think. Okay, where are we? Okay, we're going to go back to the phones where Kyle is waiting. He's calling us from Lake Worth. Good morning, Kyle. Hey, good morning, everybody. Good morning. Before my question, I just wanted to say that I really appreciate you guys as a dealer and everything that you guys do.

It's such a pleasure going there instead of being, you know, opposite like a lot of dealers are um thank you and just some of the people leo and sales uh jason in the office and and stephen and anthony are the ones i've dealt with and they're all just fantastic thanks very much praises a little they're all great thank you um yeah you're welcome my question was about um ordering a car you guys touched on it about a month ago like what happens when you order a car nowadays um with a Toyota you're putting you're not really putting the order in, but you're waiting for, like, an allocation to come that matches, like that color and everything?

Yeah, you're pretty close. Every two weeks, a new batch of cars are issued to all the Toyota dealers. That's the allocations. And we get a bunch, and it's based on the cars we had sold prior and also how fast we're selling them. When we get out the cars, sometimes we get very lucky and get exact matches as far as, like, the model number and the color and sometimes we're close and then our inventory manager goes into a frenzy and begins trading these VIN numbers to match the oldest orders and so we fill the orders so we get a bunch of cars and then we sort them out to the best of our ability and I don't want

to brag we've but we've been kind of operating with this model for years even before the pandemic we've historically we've been taking orders and we sell cars all the country so when this hit us we kind of already had a system in place and we know how to manage it Um, so it's pretty efficient, but it is, uh, it's a lot. We, I think I mentioned we are approaching a thousand orders. We have 1,200 orders right now on our, in our order log, 1,200 orders. And so, um, yeah, so it is, it's kind of a, the Toyota system wasn't designed for this. Um, but, you know, thankfully we've, um, luckily, we're, we kind of built a system before this thing hit. So if you, like, if you did put an order in and, and it's like a six month wait, Would it be possibly faster if you gave more of a, if you gave several colors that you might be okay with? Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

And we mentioned that if you're flexible with color or equipment, because what happens is about 15% of our orders cancel every month, just on average, for various reasons. And so vehicles come available. We go to the oldest orders, try to fill those. And we will approach somebody with an older order and says, hey, I know you're waiting. for a silver carb, this white one became available. So, and we give them the opportunity. If they don't want it, it'll go to the next oldest order in that order. Yeah, that's a good point.

Okay. That's a very good point, Stu. And also equipment, too. So if you're open to equipment, this came up, a caller had a question earlier about port equipment. We don't make anybody take any port equipment at all, especially not toy guard, but if there is a dealer has a vehicle. Port equipment is installed by not the manufacturer, but...

By the distributor. Distributor, yeah. And the southeast Toyota is a distributor. There's not too many distributors, so that isn't a problem around the world. Right. It's just in South Florida. Yeah, around here. And so I can imagine a situation... Yeah, but I can imagine a situation where even a vehicle came available and it had Toy Guard on it,

and we wouldn't have ordered it that way, but we would say, hey, it's got this stuff and give you the opportunity to say yes or no. The Toyota Guard sells for $6.99, and we pass along it our cost, which is $250. Okay. So, yeah, because I ordered a Rav4 hybrid about, I think, about four months ago, and I think there's still no date or anything like that. I'm not sure. Like, like, new people ordering hybrids? That's a tough one. Like what those wait times are?

Yeah, the wait times for the hybrids, Ravre hybrids, the Highlander hybrids, they're longer than the regular ones. So when did you order it? March. In March, what was the estimated time that they gave you back then? I think Leo had mentioned maybe around three months, but I understand that there's no way to know, really, exactly. Yeah, we're seeing six months on some vehicles, a year on some really hard to get ones, too. I don't think yours will take any key year. I'll tell you what, Kyle, that's great, great news that you just shared.

You said three months. I have a customer that waited one year for a ruby red, and towards the end of waiting, for that, they decided that, you know, maybe they'd just stick a black hybrid Rav 4. But three months, that's sweet, to wait a year. Well, he hasn't got the garage. You're going to bend a little. The car hasn't come yet. So during that wait time, you'll bend a little as far as, you know, features in color is concerned.

Yeah, is that something I should contact the salesman about and possibly say I'm more open to other colors? absolutely that would be really helpful I mean I know that when things if something comes available you will get a call from Leo but yeah let them know ahead of time just to be a little proactive and and maybe get a little bit more information on the the squeaky wheel gets the oil and if I had a car order today and I was in your shoes I would be contacting the dealership and the salesman I would not want to sell a car to Earl every every month well the things fluctuate and and I had a customer call me the other day, and I recommended it says, what color?

I said, order a white car. That's the most popular color, and they build more of them if you get an off color. So situations change. So by calling the dealership and saying, where are we now, and then getting feedback, you're the squeaky wheel, say, okay, I got a red car ordered. Supposing I make it a white car. And then, well, if you get a white car, you can get one next month. I mean, you have to kind of work with the dealer, but don't order the car and go home and wait because you're not the squeaky wheel.

The squeaky wheel is going to get the car. Being flexible is really important, Kyle, being flexible. That car that you're waiting for, for instance, my example that I mentioned a moment ago, somebody ordering a car in January and eight months into it, they decide, hey, Nancy, what would happen if I didn't want the ruby red? what if I got something? I said, that's a great idea. Very good idea. I mean, here's another reason. We're talking about our dealership, but a lot of people have cars ordered the dealerships all over the country, and this would never happen in our dealership. But your car might come in, and you have a price of $3,000 over MSRP, and somebody comes in and offers $4,000 over MSRP and buys your car. So that's another reason to,

stay on top of it when you order a car you want to know especially when the car is going to be shipped invoiced and that way you're really they know you're waiting for that car they're not going to sell it to somebody else but if they haven't heard from you in three or four months and somebody comes in salesman takes advantage of the opportunity sell it out from under you exactly or god forbid you take a vacation and they can't get in touch with you for a day and they use that as an excuse and remember this Kyle you're not going to wear out your you know your way of getting in touch with somebody at any of the dealerships. I mean, communication is a great idea, and it takes you far.

Okay, that's really helpful information, everyone. I appreciate it. Thanks, Kyle. Give us a call again. Happy Fourth of July. Thank you. Happy Fourth of July to you, 877-960-9960, or you can text us at 772-497-6-5-30. We are going to go to...

Yeah, we got some texts. I got a text from Bob, and he says, Good morning, concerning tires. I had an experience with the space saver tire. It was in a 2006 vehicle. One day as I was driving, it exploded in the trunk. An approximate one-foot tear in the sidewall was ripped open. People should check how old their spare tire.

This spare tire was never used, and it's easy to forget about it. What causes that? Is it exploded, just heat, pressure? I mean, it's the space saver spare, So it's just a little donut. Right. But remember those donuts, so, however, are pressurized, intended to be pressurized as 60 PSI, which is generally about double what a normal tire pressure is.

And they are a lightweight thing. They're only meant for a temporary use of about 40 to 50 miles. Heat, rubber degradation, and it just finally like an old can of soup with botulism. And possibly the tire was a little defective right from the factory. Maybe the sidewall had a bubble or some. defect in it and just over time it finally what I want to know Bob if you can text did you hear this explosion and were you driving and it scared the crap out of you because that's the first thing I thought of I mean

or if it woke you up in the middle of night it sounded like a shotgun going off either way that's that's terrifying uh got a text here from James in Phoenix Arizona James wants to know what our thoughts hey this is probably for you did what is your thoughts in the new quote unquote new FTC proposal Most of the ideas have already been rules in place, but not enforced. So the FTC is proposing a ban on bait and switch claims, fraudulent junk fees. They're calling them junk fees, surprise junk fees, bait and switch, other tactics. And so they're proposing this.

It's going to go to public comments on this thing. So if it does, we will be encouraging people on the show to go in favor. But the question is, and I'll turn it over to Earl, is all, it's the same question as enforcement. You can have all the rules in the world that you want. But if you can't, if you're not going to enforce it, what's the point? And you and I talked about this yesterday morning, and I told you how excited I was about it. And you told me about the, well, shared with me the pros and cons. Well, it's like a lot of government good intent.

They don't do their research. They don't know their homework. Don't get me wrong. I'm so happy the Federal Trade Commission is thinking about making some more rules as far as what car dealers could do, cannot do when they're selling cars. They're deceiving their customers now. But you can see they haven't been in the trenches. They haven't gone down there. They were talking, I recall, some of the language had to do about accessories.

Charging junk fees for fraudulent add-ons and products and services that provide no benefit of the consumer. You know, see, the danger, here's the crux of it, and they just don't get it. you can the junk add-ons the things are pre-installed by the dealer

in other words the car's on the lot the customer hadn't even come in the door and they put nitrogen in the tires and they put some Mickey Mouse wax on it

they put they tent the windows they put on some cheap stripes and I go on and on and pretty soon they got $1,000 worth of products that cost them

$200 and it's all on the car They don't put it in the advertisement. The customer comes in for the advertised price. And when they sign the paperwork, they've got an extra $1,000 here. What's this? I don't want those items. I'm sorry, they're pre-installed.

I can't take them off. That's why I think this rule here. Yeah. The one rule of all this, I agree with you on that. They're going to say, because especially if the language is any vague at all, and they say it doesn't have a value and they'll prove the value. But they're requiring something, and they want to require something called they have to disclose something called the true offering price.

And listen to this, it's the full price of consumer would pay excluding only taxes and government fees. Oh, I love that. I didn't use that. So if there's a big thing that's as true offering price on every ad, they can forget everything else and just put that in there. And let people compare. Simple, simple.

See, that's the government. If they can say something in 25 words or less, they'll give you 2,500 words of less. All they have to do is say it is against the law, federal law, and it will be enforced, car dealers cannot advertise cars with anything except government fees or added. And that's what this is. Yeah. That's what this happened. That's a part of the proposal. Yeah. And if they pass that, forget the rest of it. You don't care. Yeah. You just wonder what the price is and then not be tricked when you sign the paperwork. It was exciting that

the Federal Trade Commission was getting involved and it was, you know, exposed. Everybody was reading that. You can also go to yAA.org, and you can read about the Federal Charate Commission and their move forward. Hey, Bob got back to us on the exploding spare tire. He said it sounded like a gun going off. He believed it was due to heat deterioration in the vehicle parked every day in the outside South Florida Sun. And it happened a few years ago. Interesting. I'm glad you're all right, and I'm glad your heart's okay.

Yeah, thanks for getting back with us. We're going to go back to the phones where we're going to talk to Mark and Palm Beach Gardens. and Marty, hold on. We'll be right with you. Good morning, Mark. Good morning to you, well, and good morning to all your listeners. I have just two little snippets here, basically on comments I've already heard on this morning show. A little clarification. Let's say I come in with a car, you know, the gas and the electric car. I'm sorry, I'm suffering from a brain pause here. Hybrid?

What do they call that? Hybrid, yeah. And I have a battery failure after, let's say, four years, and they've got to replace a battery. I've heard the conversations about, you know, how they take the old battery and they recondition it or rebuild. Now, when I get a new battery for the car, you know, the replacement battery, is that going to be a brand new battery from the manufacturer or the battery manufacturer? or am I going to get a rebuild, you know, where I bought the car with a brand new battery and that's filled? Do I get a brand new battery again or do I get a rebuild battery and is that disclosed to the consumer? It's whichever one you ask for. I mean, you can get either one.

Nope. If you're getting it under warranty, it will be a factory brand new battery. I don't think he said warranty. Well, at four years old, it'd be warranty. Okay, well, were you talking wordied, Mark, or just... Yeah, and, you know, sidestep on that, how long is a battery on a car like that warranty for? Depends on the brand, Toyota is what? Ten years, 150,000 miles.

So you need to know the brand, and usually they'll... Yeah, I was talking about, I'm sorry, if I didn't mention, I was talking about a Camry, because that's what I drive. Okay, yeah. But I'll be just wondering, rebuild versus new. Yeah, I thought you were talking out of warranty. If you're out of warranty,

then you can either buy a new battery or rebuild. The rebuilds a better value. But under warranty, certainly, you want a new battery. Yeah. All right. Second thing is I'm confused here about when you were talking about if I go into any dealer,

not necessarily yours, but if I go into any dealer right now, and I have to order a car, and it's, you know, expected in in three months. And let's say it's a midnight blue rab four. Now, it comes in, it hits the ground, that specific dealer. And they might understand that, let's say, if I haven't gotten a phone call yet, if my car is in, and another consumer is walking the lot, and they say, hey, boy, that's a beautiful midnight blue rab four.

Is that available for sale? and the salesman says, well, no, that's already a purchased vehicle, and they say, well, hey, you know, how much are they paying for it? And the salesman said, well, three grand over cost. And that consumer would say, hey, I'll offer you four grand over cost. Is that, it might understand that that could possibly be a situation where my new car sitting on the lot could be sold to that. It probably happens more often.

They're operating more money. probably happens today more often than ever because of the shortage. But it's always been that. People will come in before coded. They'd come into a car dealership. They'd buy the car and they say, I'll be in tomorrow and pick it up. And they come back the next day. Somebody came in and paid them more money and the car got delivered.

And they make excuses. It's all about the money, Mark. If you have an ordered car, and we had an earlier caller about this, I said the squeaky wheel gives oil. You need to call and get the status on your car. Now, when your car finally is built, there will be a VIN number. And get the VIN number and make that part of your purchase document. And when you have a purchase document with the VIN number for the car you bought,

then you have a legal binding contract. And if they sell that car to somebody else, you could sue them for damages and scare the hell out of them if nothing else. but they're breaking the law, they're violating the contract. Until you get the VIN, there's anybody's word about whose car it was. But when you have the VIN, you have specificity, and you can't get screwed. And so, now, what happens to me as this dealership's loyal customer, and let's say I come in and go, hey, I understand my car hit the ground here,

and they, well, it's been sold to another consumer. Now, where does that put me back to ordering the car, you know, having to wait another three months for midnight blue wrap? Yes, you are, and you should take action against the dealership. That's unforgivable, and again, important that everybody listening out there, because a lot of cars, most cars are being ordered today, and you have to watch that car and track it and know when it's coming in, know what the VIN number is, or this can happen to you. and that's just the way business is. Mark, we've got three callers waiting, and thank you very much for the call,

and please call again next week. I'm just saying that's bad consumer relations between the deal and the consumer. You better believe it. I have a great weekend. Thank you, Mark. Thanks, Mark. That was a great question.

We're going to go to Marty, who's calling us from West Palm Beach, and Bill, hang on, we'll be right with you. Good morning, Marty. Good morning. How are you? Great, thank you. 4th of July. Same to you and everybody there. I got a quick question. I ordered a fully loaded Camry from your dealership in March. Then I decided, oh maybe a month ago, I said to make it a hybrid.

So I was told that that didn't affect the order at all because it didn't, they hadn't started building the car. Correct. So when I was in for service last week, I asked Jason, And he told me I'm number 305 out of 1,200 or whatever is coming to your dealership. Can you tell by number 305? Is that another three months, six months? No, we can't. We can't because that's all by each model and each, every variable has a different time frame. So in the 304 people ahead of you, there are some people that got a year wait.

Some people have been waiting a month. I mean, it's all mixed up. So what do you think personally for a Camry hybrid? And it's not that I need it. There's no urgency. Take it longer, you're a hybrid than a non-hybrid, so it's your choice. The best, you want the best estimate of your time of arrival is to call Jason, Jason Lady. And he can give you the best idea because he is, him and Matt have a feeling for the rhythm of these things by model.

you know if you ask me i would call him myself to find out to get the best estimate for you yeah and then my other question is which i'll try to make brief is i'm going to bring that my current car into your dealership and see what you're going to give me for it right if i don't like your trade in value and i go somewhere else you take the higher price from somebody else of course we'll make the deal with the other offer so yeah the only thing you need to consider just to make remember is that this is a sales tax savings so you add the six and a half percent of the value back you know as long as you're looking at that but we encourage everybody to do that and also do some easier stuff too um you know around the time shortly

before you're going to be trading it in you know once you get a date um try carvana and vroom and these other online things because it's easy you can do it right from your and table and get a firm figure right there. So I get multiple sources and go with the highest, but just remember the sales tax part of it. Hi, Florida. I appreciate to go. Okay.

Have a great weekend, Marty. Have a good weekend. Stay in touch. Okay, bye-bye. We're going to go to Bill, who has been holding Good Morning, Bill. Bill's calling from Summerfield, Florida. Good morning, Bill.

Good morning. I think you mean Ron, and good morning. Ron. Right. Right. I have a question for you. Can you explain torque, pound feet of torque, and how that compares to horsepower. Can you explain those three items? To put it out in the most basic terms, torque is what gets a load moving. That's the power that spins the wheels. and gets the load moving, makes the car start moving, and gets you going forwards. The more torque you have, the heavier the weight you can push. Horsepower is how fast you can reach, how fast you can actually get up to speed,

or how high a speed you can actually reach. The more horsepower you have, the higher the speed the car can eventually reach. Most engines try to have a nice balance between torque and horsepower, to where you've got enough torque to get the engine, get the car rolling, and enough horsepower to get up to highway speeds.

Well, let me ask you this question. 80 miles an hour. Rick, let me ask you this question. Horsepower can't be separated from torque. If your rear end ratio is gonna determine the torque of the car, right, along with the horsepower. Yes. So you could have a very high horsepower car

and you would have a very low, I don't know whether it's lower high, but not a high torque rear end, and you wouldn't have a lot of torque. Or you have to, if you want to have the maximum acceleration, then you want to have the right rear end paired with the maximum horsepower to fit with that torque and that rear end. Right. All the gearing has got to be engineered in. It all has to do with the build of the engine, the transmission itself,

whether it's rear wheel drive, front wheel drive, it doesn't matter. it's going to be in the design as to whether you're building is something that has lots of torque, lots of horsepower, or a middle point in somewhere in the middle. And say if you want to pull a boat, you want a vehicle like a good solid truck, there's lots of torque that can get that heavy load moving, but at the same time, this isn't a vehicle that's going to do high speeds.

If you want something with lots of high speed, you want high horsepower, not so much torque. Yeah. So the torque is a measure of force, right? Okay, folks. The pound's feet, how does that measure? It's a calculation that basically the more foot pounds of torque you have,

the bigger the load you can get moving. That's how they measure torque. How far, how much, when you talk about foot pounds of force to move so many feet. So it takes X number of pounds of horse to move 10 feet. It takes 2x to move 20 feet. And all of this equation is decided by the horsepower. You could have, if you had a little bit of the engine, and you could have something that would deliver a huge amount of torque,

it's not going to do it unless it has the power to drive the wheels. Correct. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks for the call. Okay. So if you want to go fast,

horsepower is really important. That's right. Hey, I have a, real quick, some of, I'm sorry, James from Phoenix, Texas, with a correction that we gave some bad information. It's join yAA.com is the website, join yAA.com, not yAA. YAA.org.

Yeah, that goes to like a dance or something else. And it's also, it's called, it's called your advocate alliance. It's not your auto advocate. They originally were your auto advocate. but I think they were in conflict with another, they had a chance their name because there was another company established. And who sent that text?

That's from James and Phoenix. And he sent the website. It's join YAA.com. James? Thank you so much. We definitely aren't perfect here, that's for sure. Thank you so much. And at YAA.com, boy, what a great place to go.

Thanks for bringing that to our attention. And thank you for listening to Earl Stewart on Cars. Okay, we've got YouTube's to get to. We've got some texts to get to, and our calls, we have shut down the lines, and we're going to go to. Neither or. I got just one quick one here. John says, I've been in contact with one of your salespersons for Avenza, not taking orders anymore for 2022s and cannot order the 2023 until August. and was told the wait time after order could be more than a year.

I'm going to order it, but it seems the car will essentially be a year old upon delivery from an equity standpoint. I've been told I am on the list to call as soon as 2023 models can be ordered. So just waiting. My present car is in 2008 and should have been replaced before this. The equity situation, you don't pay for the car until you take delivery, So there's no loss of, you're not depreciating your car until you actually pay for it and take delivery of it. Let me say this.

You can order the car now. You just can't be specific. But there will be a waiting list until we have the specifics. We won't have the price. But if you want a 223, you describe the car you want, and we will take the order. It'll be unofficial because we can't tell you any specifics. Well, it's just, we have contact in your name down. And we should be doing that.

So we just don't, we shouldn't tell a customer, I'm sorry, you can't order the car now. We should say you can order the car now. Give me as many details as you can. We might not be able to get the color or the equipment you want, but just tell us if you had your druthers, what you'd want in that 2023. And we go order the car from a waiting list perspective. So that way, you're going to get your car sooner than all the other people that call in. Yeah, and they are in the system with their name, address and everything in the vehicle of interest.

It's just that there's nothing happening right now. Well, I don't think that's not what this guy said. Well, he says he's on the list. Oh, okay. To be called as soon as the 23 is going to be ordered. That's what we're doing. Get on the list, yeah. That's what we're doing.

Okay, next one, we have some anonymous feedback. As long as people keep buying cars at exorbitant, marked up prices over MSRP, the dealers will have no incentive to drop the market value add-ons. And that's, well, that's true. As long as people are willing to pay the prices, that's how it works. And when people push back or no longer interested, prices will come down. Next one from anonymous feedback. If someone is dumb enough to pay $16,000 over a sticker price for Mercedes-Benz,

they deserve to get hosed. The Mercedes-Salesman at North Palm Beach is most likely working next door by now. That's harsh. That's pretty harsh. And I think this was from last week. I can't, I have to comment. Anybody that pays, how much was it? 16,000?

16,000. It's too much money. But if you're worth a billion dollars, it's trump change. So what's happening now? We're saying, you know, the wealthier getting wealthier and the poor are getting poorer. We have this situation going on in the country. and people are, you know, they're paying crazy money for homes and cars, and they're not getting hosed because they got a whole lot of money and they can do it.

The dealers know this and they realize it. The people that can't afford it aren't able to buy a car, and that's a real pain. If they need a car, the prices are being driven up to a point that they can't afford, and if they need a car, they can't buy a car. That's the damage. It's not, it's not, there are a few dumb people paying a lot of money. Do not wait for the Mercedes customer. Right.

Or the Rolls-Roy's customer. No, I mean, there was a point that we brought up before, which is this does trickle down into the, the use market. And there are plenty of regular working class people that are buying, you know, Mercedes and BMWs used a few years old, you know, realtors, things like that, just trying to make it. So it does, it does squeeze people. But, yeah, when the guy comes in and buys a brand new, whatever, Mercedes pays $20,000. I look at these Corvettes, the limited edition cars. You know there's only going to be 20 of them or 200 of them, and they're charging some incredible price, and people pay it.

They're not stupid. They just got too much money. All right. I got nothing. Okay. Before I do the mystery shopping report, may I have my blog? This is, Nancy mentioned this at the start of the show. open letter to Ron DeSantis and it's my effort. I had an open letter to our

Attorney General previous to that it was ignored and we've talked many times on the show about we've got plenty of laws we just don't enforce the law so the government every time they want a little PR they want to get some more votes they make a law and a lot of time and they fight about it and that takes too long and they keep making laws. I read the other, I think it was yesterday a day before in Florida, there's 150 new laws on the books. 150 new laws. I don't know what the laws are. I might be able to name three or four of them, but they just keep cranking out these laws. And they don't tell the police or anybody else about it. I mean, they don't even tell the voters about it. They make

these laws. So we've already got laws on the books that protect car buyers. So in just a futile final attempt, probably. I hope it's not futile. I wrote this letter to the governor to Sanis. And I just spoke to him, you know, just got real. Say, listen, here's what's going on. You've got a lot of car buyers being screwed. The dealers are charging thousands of dollars over sticker price because they could get away with. Then they're adding the junk fees. And then they're adding dealer installed options. They're raping the consumers of Florida because I'm talking to the governor of Florida. You know about it, I know about it, everybody knows about it,

why don't you do something about it? Well, the reason, and I say this in the blog, the reason you don't do the thing about it is you're looking for votes. And I'm not picking on to say this. Every politician, that's what they got to have. What good is it to be a professional politician if you don't get elected?

How are you going to get elected if you don't tell the truth, if you do tell the truth, I should say? And you want to pick, you want to pick the right causes. So I'm saying to DeSantis in this letter, here's a great cause for you to get, he's going to run for president next year, and he wants to get elected president of the United States. Everybody that votes, most everybody that votes drives a car. Most everybody that votes buys a car. If you could just somehow develop a platform saying just what this FTC law is considering saying, car dealers cannot sell a car, quote a price on a car, advertise a car, unless it is the

full price out the door, plus tax and tag only, plus government fees only. If you can enforce that law, which we already have on the books, enforce it. Tell your attorney general to go and start charging these people, you will create a landslide of support from voters, not just from Florida, but all over the United States. so that's a blog it's on earlancars.com it's on Facebook I'd say it's in the Florida weekly it's not going to be in the hometown news because they thought it was too political and I didn't agree with them but did I hear you say it's their newspaper it's kind of rhetoric but it's not in the hometown news guess why it's too

political happy 4th of July ladies and gentlemen and I'll tell you what freedom of speech it's a beautiful thing we can't do the mystery shopping report because I can't find it so okay you can have mine ladies and gentlemen

you can vote for the mystery shopping report by going to our text line which is 772 4976530 special thank you to Agent Lightning

she did another fabulous job and a special thank you to Stu for his involvement in this and his eloquent writing and also I want to take a moment before we go to the mystery shopping report to wish Josh Stewart a very happy birthday happy birthday. Happy birthday little brother. Yay. My baby boy. Okay, message of Mike Erdman, Nissan. Agent Lightning was back of the road again this week on the road again when she paid a visit to Cocoa Beach and Mike Erdman Nissan it's always nice to get out of town see what car dealers are up to outside of our usual stomping ground we've delivered

reports from all over the state of Florida Miami to Pensacola and we've identified some patterns we discovered that the further away you get from South Florida Sodom and Gamora aka the Belly of the Beast and that's Sue's term I love that term I'm I might replace Sodom and Gomorra with the belly of the beast. The better the dealers tend to behave. So you just keep moving north from South Florida, things get better. Except when you get close to the big metro areas like Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville.

We also learned that smaller family-owned dealerships are on average a little better. I mean, there's a pretty nasty ones out there. They're not saints. In general, exactly, yeah. Unfortunately, we've also found out that during these pandemic-induced once-in-lifetime market conditions, it's entirely predictable what will happen at most, if not all, dealerships. We know that the prices given age lightning for new cars will be over MSRP. We know that in about 75% of the time, the dealers will have an addendum consisting of thousands of dollars

and extra charges for cheap. Dealer installed junk, 100% nitrogen in the tires. That says it all. 100% of them will have some form of junk fee or fees, hidden fees, dealer fees. I mean, the problem is they are clever enough, the dealer is clever enough to change the names of all the extra profit that they're making. So by confusing the names was surprisingly substantial. Like 20 years ago, 25 years, the term dealer fee was it sounded legitimate. And then they whizzed, customers whizzed up.

Yeah. So they have tag agency fee. Guess what? You're not paying the tag agency anything. They have electronic filing fee. Nothing to do with a license. It's just a profit they're making for the work that they should do in their delivery of the car to you. So anyway, here we are. That's the landscape of the same out of the state of Florida. Two agent lightning experienced the same in Tennessee and Pennsylvania. So we've been all over. The disturbing conclusion that we're coming to is that there is no sanctuary for the new car buyer anywhere in America during this time in history.

Having said all that, let's get to Agent Lightning's investigation of Mike Erdman, Nissan, and Cocoa Beach. He also has a Toyota dealership. We know the guy. He's been around for a long time and he has a Nissan dealership in Cocoa Beach. Even though we probably know what's going to happen

in the end, it'll be a hell of story. Operation Report I am Agent Lightning First person My son and I arrived at the dealership early evening I love it when she takes her family And she's taking her husband in too

We were struck by how huge and new The facilities were The Nissan dealership Shared the same property with Mike Erdman Toyota We went up there and looked at that a little while ago Oh we did? Yeah when we were looking at a dealerships

Oh I forgot about that Yeah We were greeted to buy a salesperson As we emerged from my car His name was Christian, and he went out of his way to shake both of our hands and asked what brought us in. I told him I was there to buy a car for my son. I said we were trying to keep our price under $30,000 out the door.

Christian asked us to follow him inside so he could show us what he had available. There were a few new vehicles in the showroom. We headed over and started browsing. After a few minutes, we settled on a new 2002 Nissan Rogue. Christian attempted to interest us in Nissan Kick. They got some cute names for these cars. Nissan Kick, as it was smaller and less expensive, but I thought it was too small. Christian said he had a new rogue sport.

We could drive an offer to pull it around for us. Made a copy of our licenses and asked us to meet him outside. The car had an MSRP of $26,500,000 plus $2,000 market adjustment, making Mike Ergman's list process. price, $28,560. Christian told us that if we buy today, we can get either a $100 visa gas card or

$350 where the fireworks from the road from the street. Oh, that's so cute. That's when you get out of South Florida. Slightly rural. That's a small town. Small town. I mean, you know, okay, I don't think,

I can hear the sales being now. A hundred dollar visa card ain't going to do it. No, no, no. I'll take the basket of the peaches. I'll go over across the street, even though the fireworks den over there, and I'll say, how much do all these fireworks costs?

And when you get $100 worth, and we'll tell them it's $350. Anyway, I don't know. My son drove on the test drive, and we listened to Kristen's description of the car features. We returned to the dealership, found the same desk we used

before Christian didn't sit down. Okay. He was off to see his sales manager. That's the salesman Christian. My son and I sat down and waited and waited. Our sales was gone for 17 minutes. Then he returned with two forms for me to sign. This is interesting to me.

One was so he could get the numbers. So you had to sign a contract before they'll tell you the price. Now, I'm going to the public trying to buy a New York choice steak. I want two of them. and I don't see any price on the package so I go up to the cashier the cashier says sign here please what's this I've got to go ask the manager

for authority to give you a price on the stakes I bet it's a commitment that he shows he goes I am willing to buy you know I'm willing to buy today are you willing to buy the steak today sir yes that's why I'm here you're not going to buy the steak well I don't know

you're not going to go to win Dixie and cut my throat you go to win Dixie and get the lowest price of the stake and I'll meet it I mean, so this is the game, folks. You don't buy the stake. Someone's going to be right behind you. I can buy the steak in a minute.

That's right. Okay. Okay. One was so he could give me the numbers. And the other contract I decided. You know, I turned my, I turned my phone off. I know you did, and it's still ringing. That's your watch ringing.

Oh, that's my watch ringing, yeah. Okay. That's Jimmy. Oh, I got so I got discombobulated here. That's okay. Where are we? One was so you get the numbers. Oh, yeah, and the other one.

Okay, the second contract was a privacy notice that ensured me that he would not sell my information. Let me interject. I know what it was. Go ahead. Well, we're required to have privacy notices with every deal. The fact that it comes up at this stage is beyond me. This is something you sign in a finance office. You know what it says?

What it says is we can harass you to death when you leave here, and we can use your phone number and your email address and your home address and we can we can contact you i don't think ours says that no no not in that language okay but says we you you are you give us a permission to contact you whether or not you buy a car oh okay i do say that yeah we didn't ours didn't say harass our says it's oh no ours doesn't say what about my mummy yeah what What about my mummy? Do they have the right to contact her? Your mummy, no.

At some point, she wondered aloud where Christian was. Oh, you skipped a pair of me. I skipped back. I said, everybody's talking to me. You're getting me discombobulated. I signed the forms, and then the sales manager, Suzanne, came over. She tried to be funny and said that my son and I looked bored, and we were. Suzanne sat down, chatted with us for a minute, impressed that they have a female sales manager. At some point, she wondered aloud where Christian was.

Where's the damn salesman? And then left to find him. We waited for four minutes, and the two of them returned together. I wonder what she said, where the hell were you? I'm not going to sell the car for you. Suzanne reviewed the worksheet. The sale price was $28,500,000,000, same as the price on the addendum, $2,000 over sticker MSRP. Next came $606 in taxable fees.

That's a new name. This has been popular for a few years. years. Taxable fees. They might have got that from us on the show. I said the way to tell a phony charge from a real government fee is do you pay sales tax on it. And that's the acid test. So they said, oh, that's pretty good. That's obscure. We will just say taxable fees. So that's what they call them. Bs fees, profits of the dealer are also now called taxable fees. Okay, here we go. $2,000 over MSRP plus BS606 in taxable fees and $899.

which is also a taxable fee, but they call that $899 a dock fee. Deception, you know, obscuring the true price of the car. Real price was $3,505 over MSRP. Okay. I said I may have a hard time confessing to my son's father to pay for these extras. I asked what the $606 in taxable fees were. I love this. Suzanne said it was for window tent, pen stripes, and road noise installations. I have never seen taxable fees for that, right? Those aren't fees. Those are prices. They're prices. Not fees. They're prices. They're selling

your window tent and pen stripes and road installation, road noise installation, installation, not installation. and we're calling them tax on fees. If you look at the worksheet, she wrote installation. It was, okay. So I wasn't sue that misspelled that. It was the dealership. She said it was similar to the undercutting package that came on all new Toyotas. It doesn't come on all new Toyotas just to all the dealers that agree to buy.

Only evil toilets. All the evil Toyota dealers. But it's interesting that she's using that as a selling point. Like, well, Toyota does it. Yeah. Yeah. And Erdman is. is exercising his knowledge of how slick Southeast Toyota the distributor is, and he's using some of their ideas.

And he's doing himself. To his Nissan dealership, so there he are. Okay, the real price was a $3505 over sticker. I said I may have all that. I asked if there was any room on the price, and Suzanne said her hands were tied, blame the market. She said if I was ready to go into finance right now, she'd knock a few hundred dollars all the price. buy today

if you don't buy today the price is going up okay I said that wasn't going to do it thank them for their time Christian walked us to the door so there we have it another adventure and fantasy

land of buying a car during the COVID pandemic aftermath and $3,000 plus over sticker price and we've got Mike Urban Nissan and they are in Cocoa Beach

lovely air area of the state. It is, yes. Beautiful. Yeah. Okay, folks. Let's get our votes in. We'll take our votes. Send them in by Facebook, send them in by YouTube, text them, however you want to vote. Mark has texted us. He gives him a D-minus. He has a problem with signing to get the price. That's the only text I have coming in so far. But as far as my opinion, this sounds like a C-grade to me. I mean, I don't think there is nothing shocked me. The signing for the price, that sounds typical to me, too. We don't always encounter it.

But usually getting a signature for a commitment is something that salespeople get at a lot of dealerships before they go to see their manager. So I didn't like it. And also, they're not that much over MSRP. I mean, we've seen a lot worse. So I would say they're right in the middle of the road. Did you ever think if we have a conversation where you said, 3,000 over MSRP isn't all that bad?

Well, it is average because we just found out from Phil who called in and said that's the national average. That's the national average, exactly, yeah. Wow. Amazing. How about you? Do you have any grades coming in? We've got Andrew with a C-minus for Coco. Tom, with a D, old-school tactics and junk fees. Mark Ryan with a D-minus. Mark Smith, D. Brian, come on, man. Cut out the BS fees. They do an F. Mark Anderson, Mark from St. Louis, a D plus. Wayne, nothing I could but D minus. John, same old, same old. We've seen this all so many times, just done with this method of sales. D. Donnie White, D for added dealer profit fees. And that's it so far. And for myself, I, Well, to put it on the curve, we'll go with the C minus, but only because it's, there was nothing

really high pressure and nothing hidden, nothing seemed to pop out as a surprise. And their dealer fees were relatively small, except for that, you know, markup over MSRP, which again was slightly below national average. Yeah. And I don't know Nissan supply situation or the demand. Typically, Nissan doesn't have much demand because they don't sell very many cars. But that's not to say that there's a huge discrepancy between supply and demand now. Jonathan Wellington gives them a D.

Martha on Facebook, C-minus. We're being nicer than our listeners. Yeah, yeah. Nancy, what's the story? we don't have time for my story but I will give you a grade and it's just

monotonous I would say you know it's just a continued disappointment Suzanne what's up with you I mean are they bored no they're not bored they're just stunned again with this

repetitious way of doing business Christian Susan the whole gang I give the dealership an F. Hmm. Well, you know, I'm going to be a little harsher than it's too. If it's a C, I'm going to do a C-minus. A little disappointed in the signing the, I said a contract, there are contracts.

I mean, anytime you sign something that somebody else is written. I think you agree to something in writing, isn't that? So a couple of BS pieces of paper, and I think the idea. is to obligate you, get commitment, this two said earlier. It's kind of sneaky. I didn't like that. And I also didn't like the fact that they used taxable fees as a tag for a dealer installed accessories. I mean, that was pretty deceptive. I think we saw that at another recent mystery shop where somebody explained what the fees were in that term. And so maybe that's becoming a trend here. I don't remember that, but that could be the case. I'm trying to save money

on addendum stickers. I mean, they're playing with some antics here. A fee, I'll have to Google that. A fee really is a charge. I don't think it's all, you got to have to say government. Do you don't get something back tangible for a fee? Parking fee. I don't know.

We'll research that. It's a payment in exchange for services or advice, but not tangible items. Services or advice. Okay, well, that's... You mentioned those two forms, and you thought it was, you know, rather sneaky. Is it sneaky? Come on, or is it intimidating? Is it intimidating to walk into a dealership and voice your opinion and what you want

and that you're not going to go for all this other garbage? My thoughts? It's old school. And I think partly, one thing we see with small dealerships, we said earlier, that they tend to be a little nicer than the big stores. But one thing that you see more in small dealerships is old school. I mean, the old... Yeah, right.

They're the last to catch up to the kind of like the new cutting edge sort of things. And that's basically what we're saying. C-minus, I think, is a fair grade. That wraps it up. I think F is a fair grade. Jonathan, what do we have left? Two minutes. Hey, guess what, folks?

We're going to talk about something happy. How about Joey Chestnut? What do you think this guy is worse? I'll tell you. $2.5 million. He has profited from eating. Guess what? Hot dogs.

Oh, yeah. Hot dogs. Hot dogs. I believe maybe somebody here can correct me. Is it 76 hot dogs? I don't know, but he's not a big guy, is he? He is a medium. Medium guy?

All right. And guess what, ladies. Mickey is back. Uh-huh. Yeah, she's won seven years in a row. Last year, she was out because of a pregnancy. And Michelle won last year. I believe she ate 30 and 3 quarters hot dogs.

Do I don't they have corn dog eating contest? I like corn dogs better. Do you do? Yeah, you get fast fuller. That's why. Yeah. Okay, folks, happy 4th of July. Thank you all for joining us.

and we do appreciate your company. Have a great weekend. We'll see you right back here next Saturday morning at 8 a.m. We're going to be.