Earl Stewart on Cars - 07.27.2019 - Your Calls, Texts, and Mystery Shop of Grieco Chevrolet Delray Beach

Episode Date: July 27, 2019

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

Good morning. I'm Earl Stewart. I welcome you to Earl Stewart on Cars, a live talk show all about how to buy, lease, maintain, or repair your car without being ripped off by a car dealer. With me in the studio is Nancy Stewart, my wife, co-host, and a strong consumer advocate, especially for our female business. We also have Rick Kearney, an expert on how to keep your car running right. I dare you to ask a question that Rick can't answer about the mechanics or electronics of your car. Also with us is 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. Well, I tell you what, we're an excited group here in our brand new studio. You probably can't see too much of it. Maybe the green background here, but we want to thank True Oldies for allowing us to have the privilege of using this top of the tech line 21st century super duper studio I hope the sound is better that's what it's all about and maybe you can see us a little better we got cameras all over the place and you heard my introduction I have a little modification there my son Stu Stewart isn't with us this morning

but we have one of our old regulars here Alan Napier who is our collision repair expert. And Alan used to be on the show every week. And we decided that, you know, more infrequent visits because you don't wreck your car as often as you have to maintain your car. And most of Alan's expertise is in the repair, body repair business. And he's also very good with the insurance company. So I know we've got a lot of regular listeners folks that have been with us for years, been doing this for 15 years. But a lot of regulars would have missed Alan. They've asked why he isn't on the show more frequently. Well, here he is. So take advantage of Alan Napier, and you can text us your calls, text your questions at 772-4976530,

anything to do with collision, paint, rust, you know, dealing with insurance companies. That's one of the most treacherous things you have to do with. The insurance company is always going to take it in more premiums. They want to pay out in claims. And so that is kind of a problem. If you have a problem in that regard, we'll certainly ask you to give Alan a call. So text, as I said, 772-497-6530. And, of course, call us 877-960-960. That's 877-960-960.

Now, folks that aren't not familiar with us, what does this show all about? I mentioned that earlier, and it's in my introduction, but we thrive on your questions, your comments. We're out to make your life easier when it comes to buying, leasing, repairing, or maintaining your car. So if you have a question or a comment, don't think it's a stupid question. Don't think it's, no one's interested. We learn more from you on this show sometimes than I think you learn from us. So please give us a call at 877-960. Let's go around kind of introduce everybody in the studio, especially for the folks that don't know us.

To my left is my co-host, Nancy Stewart. She also was my wife. Nancy is a, as I said in my introduction. She's a very strong female advocate. She believes that women should have a 50-50 say in things. They have a 50-50 say in buying and driving cars. Why not and everything else? Nancy, tell us about that special offer we have for female callers.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. in. What an exciting show we have for you this morning. And to the ladies, well, I'd like to offer you $50 for the first two new lady callers this morning. Please, your voice is extremely important. And we are building a platform here for the ladies. And you can help me with that by giving us a call at 877-960. Or you can text us this morning if you're a little shy. That's 772-497-6530. Now back to the recovering car dealer. And as I said, the regular listeners are going to be glad that Alan's back. And Alan, tell us a little bit about your expertise. A lot of folks haven't heard from you in months. So you're a collision repair guy.

I've known you for a lot of years. How long have you been on the business? I've been doing this since I was about 24 when I started managing a body shop. So that's about 30-some years. I enjoy it. I still find it invigorating to show up every day and see what's going to happen. I don't care how long you're in this business dealing with customers, cars, and insurance companies. You're going to learn something new just about every day and be confronted with a situation you never thought you'd see.

I love doing the show and I love getting up at 4 o'clock to come in and do the show What an amazing man It's been a long time And it really is fun talking to you folks And I think we all learn something every week And hopefully we teach you a little something

And I don't have all the answers But I'll certainly try to help you with any car-related or car insurance-related question that I can. And I appreciate you having me back. Love to have you back, Alan. And insurance companies are one of our biggest complaints that we have dealing with your insurance companies.

They love to take your premium checks, but they hate to pay the claims out. And when you have an accident, I don't care whether it's all state, State Farm, Geico, all the insurance companies, there's usually an issue. And Alan can help you. with that because as well he does all day long he knows these insurance companies and it can help you

and uh to my right excuse me for a moment uh Tina uh we know you're on the line so you just hold on for a couple minutes yeah Tina I'll be right with you I just wanted Rick to kind of introduce himself we did a little bit of an instruction earlier but Rick tell us a little bit about your qualifications you know just about everything about maintaining and repairing cars Good morning, folks. I'm Rick Kearney, 25 years working for Earl and working as a Toyota technician, a master diagnostic tech. And please bear with us this morning with anything on the Internet because Stu is not here, so I'm kind of handling both YouTube channels and Facebook all the once.

And, well, let's say I'm a better mechanic working with cars sometimes than with the personal computers. But I'm learning my way through it all. Rick, I understand that is a double-duty job, but I know you can handle it. Let's get to Tina. Yes, good morning, Tina. Welcome to the show. We got you on the line, Tina? Okay, new studio, high-tech.

We can't hear you, Tina, if you're still there, give us a call back. Tina for Benita Springs, as Nancy said, is one of our best and most regular female callers. She is extremely knowledgeable, and this. There's not a call that she makes that we don't learn something from Tina. Absolutely. So, Tina, if you're still out there somewhere in Radio Lent, please give us a call back. 877-960-960-877-9-60-877-9-60. Girl, can you hear me?

Oh, no, I hear you. We've got a new studio and not everything is new, so we finally figured out how we could hear you. So let's hear you now. What's on your mind, Tina? up? Well, actually, I wanted, I know that we've discussed the subject before that people that have bad credit or no credit generally, for the most part, things are getting better, but generally they end up having to go to a used car lot to try and buy their first car or a car that they need. Yes. And, you know, used car lots have, understandably, a really bad reputation,

because the financing is really high. There's also delivery, yo-yo financing, all that. I'm not going to get into that this time around. But I discovered, and you know this, that every auto dealer in the state of Florida has to have a bond. And the bond has to be at least $25,000. And what it is is it's kind of like an insurance policy. If there's a disgruntled customer that tries to come back after the car dealer

for valid reasons, then there's, The bond company will work with the owner of the dealership and say, hey, listen, let's try to get this settled. Because if things escalate, what happens is the bond company will reimburse eventually the buyer. And then they will ask the money back from the auto dealer. And the thing is that the auto dealer in Florida, if he loses his bond, he cannot legally do business in Florida. So I wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit more. Well, I always say, as you just proved here, I learned something. I knew we were bonded, and I'd been a dealer for so long.

I think when I became a dealer, it was probably $25,000. And my guess is it hasn't increased any in the past 50 years. And when you said $25,000 bond, I said, that is not going to cover much of anything today. The average price of a car is over $25,000. But they should raise that. There's so many things that should be done. that the Department of Motor Vehicles apparently is overlooking, but yes, I also have to be fingerprinted. And theoretically, you cannot be a dealer in the state of Florida, I suppose most states

if you're a felon, convicted felon. So the screening is very, very careless. And there are a lot of car dealers out there that are car dealers officially, but they shouldn't be. And they should tighten up the requirements. They should require a higher bond. And you were talking about, Tina, about the financing, they call them buy-here, pay-here lots. People that have marginal credit or bad credit will go to these lots. And unfortunately, they get taken advantage of. People that are desperate to buy a car will take any car that they get sold. They will pay any price they get asked. And that's what happens if these buy-here-here-payer lots. Now there's exceptions to every rules.

Beach Cars is a buy-or-pay-her company that I know of and they treat their customers fairly. But there's thousands and thousands of these that take advantage of people that have marginal or bad credit. My advice for the folks out there with marginal credit, or if you think you have bad credit or marginal, is still check with your bank, still check with your credit union. You would be surprised today, the good lenders, the quality lenders, the bank, the bank, and the credit unions, they are a lot better at buying people with marginal credit because they get in deeper into their ability to pay. Instead of just looking at the numbers and the

Beacon score or the FICA score, they'll dig a little bit deeper. And you might be pleasantly surprised that you can get financed with your own bank or your own credit union. If you don't and you go to the dealer and you're at his mercy, you just better pray because they can charge you in Florida on a new car they can charge you 18% interest on a used car they can charge you 37 38% interest i mean that's worse than borrowing it from uh you know the mafia it's just uh is good can you imagine 38% but uh thanks for the heads up tina and uh alerting our listeners to the dangers of buying cars when you have bad credit hey yeah exactly Tina the other thing the other thing is yes go ahead hey Tina

Just before you get off the subject, because you always have multiple interesting subjects, the $25,000 bond limit, that brings to mind for me, from my aspect of the business, the $10,000 minimum or maximum payout on some policies, insurance policies. Same as the $25,000 limit. It was probably established in like the 80s. The $10,000 liability limit, that was established, I believe, in 80s. or 88. So if somebody that has a minimum insurance hits you in your car and it's their fault, odds are your damage is going to be over $10,000, but their policy is not going to pay it

and your policy has to pick it up. So same thing, kind of these dollar limit things are so antiquated from 30 and 40 years ago. I think Earl probably ought to have to put about a half million bond up. I can't afford it. What else is on your mind? That was a great question. Well, my point in bringing up the bond is that this could be leverage for a car buyer, especially, I mean, I hate to use that this word disadvantage, but that's the only adjunct because I can think of at 8 o'clock in the morning. Yeah, it's a... This could be leveraged, this could be leveraged for a car buyer because if the seller tries to engage them in yo-yo financing, if they try to pull a bait and switch.

What the buyer can do is they could go after the bond company. Yes. And the bond company will put pressure on the seller, and believe me, the seller does not want to lose their bond because if they lose their bond, they can't sell vehicles in the state of Florida. So this puts pressure on the seller to say, okay, let me go ahead and pay you some money. Let me go ahead and make the deal right. That way, I don't lose my bond.

No, you're absolutely right, Tina. That's a good point, and they should do that. Yeah, it's a great tool for the buyer. So even if you don't have a lot of money, even if your credit is not that great, don't think that you're a sitting duck. You don't have to be a sitting duck. You've got more power than you realize. Yeah, bring the third party, the bond company, you bring the Department of Motor Vehicles, and, of course, a better business bureau and the Consumer, Officer Consumer Affairs, the Attorney General's, office, when you fight with a dealer head-to-head, he's going to win. You need to bring the third parties in. I hadn't thought about the bond company, and your point is excellent. If you're really getting to a nasty fight, and of course, the last alternative is a hiring attorney. I always recommend that as the very last, but the dealers are not going to, a bad dealer who's trying to

take advantage of you and you get into a fight with them, you're not going to get anywhere until you bring in a third party that's got some power. So thank you very much for that call, Tina, and please call again. Yes, thank you, Tina. Okay, Nancy, I'm watching my mailbox, so I just want to let you know. Oh, all righty. It should be a day or two. Tina, you know that you played an important part this morning as a female, the first caller, and breaking us into our new studio. And I hope that you're viewing us and to all the ladies uh well tina opened the door give me a call first two new lady callers you can win yourself fifty dollars eight seven seven nine six oh nine sixty or you can text us rick's right here and he's taking all the texts and youtube and they can be read right here

on the air that's eight seven so excuse me seven two four nine seven six five three zero and don't forget your anonymous feedback.com we'd love to hear from you give us some feedback let us know how we're doing this radio show every saturday morning you're an important part of the show so take advantage of that i see here where we have a caller from uh gainsville i believe and it is a question about paint and i believe that would be for alan Maybe. Good morning. Good morning.

What's your name? Sorry, we didn't get your name on the screen here. Stewart. Oh, Stuart. W-A-R-T- Cohen. How can I miss that name? It's a great name. Good morning, Stuart.

Welcome to the show. Morning, thank you. What's your question? I have a 2004 Ford Taurus, and the clear code is, is burning off. I live in northern Florida. I completely burn off the roof

and I actually spray painted it and clear-coated it and I went to waxed it and it all turned white from the wax sticking. But they're all over the car the clear coat is burning off and it's fading the paint. Is there anything I can do

or cover it with to prevent the clear code from burning off? Stuart, unfortunately, The answer to that is no. There's nothing you can do to bring that paint back or stop the degrade degradation that's occurring once it starts like that. You can't slow it down. You can't stop it. The only correction is to get it repainted. And when you said that you base-coded it and clear-coded it, were you referring to you did that yourself, like with aerosol at home? I did that myself with aerosol, yeah. Yeah, and then you tried to apply wax to it, and it just kind of made a mess of it. Yeah, it was very dark.

Yeah. It looked okay, and it did have hatchmarks on it from spraying, you know, up backwards and forwards and left them right. Right. And the wax beads, when it rains it, bees on the roof, but all the wax sort of, like, sucked into the clear coat. Yeah. So it's nothing about white streaks on the roof now.

Yeah. Sounds like maybe you might have hit it with the wax. little too soon. Yeah. I don't know really where you go with that doing home remedies other than trying to wash off the wax that's on there using what you have at home would be like dawn just not dawn, well actually dawn too but palm olive the standard dish soap the really harsh stuff that'll take the wax off for you and really yeah just use warm soapy water with dish soup and try to get that wax back off of there because if you if you are

having a problem with the paint curing out and it's not cured and you put wax on it it can't release the solvents anymore so the cure process stops so if you can get that wax off and let that let that paint that you put on there breathe and let it harden up for for two three weeks I don't know what you sprayed on it but give it two or three weeks in the Florida Sun and then try reapplying your wax and you might have a better result. But as far as the rest of the car... You're saying palm olive, like palm olive and water and the sponge to wash it down or use a rag?

Yeah, just use a wash mat with warm water. And the palm olive dish soap and dawn are very harsh detergents. A lot of people wax their cars all the time and then wash them with dish soap and wash the wax right off again, not knowing. but it's a really good wax stripper so in your case you need to use that but as far as the rest of the car I know it's an older car and if you invest a little money in it

with a Mako type paint job if you're going to keep the car forever it's worth the investment you know six eight hundred dollars car runs perfectly I run about 87,000 miles I've had no problems with it yeah if you're going to sell the car

in the next year or two sell it as is because adding a shiny pretty paint job is not going to increase the value of a 15-year-old car. But if you're going to keep it, it's worth the investment so you don't start getting that surface rust. Okay, I want to try that palm all over that dawn. That sounds like a good idea if it'll get the wax marks. At least the roof will look decent again. Yep. Sounds good. By the way, I've been watching your show. This is the third time. And I think it's a great thing. to watch. I love watching your show. Well, thank you, Stuart. Well, spread the word in Gainesville.

That's, Iowa's in Gainesville, in 1964. I'm a gator, and haven't been back since. Oh. Call again, please. We love to hear from you. Okay, I'll call back next week. Thanks, Stuart. Thanks, Stuart. Thanks, and good luck. Okay, we've got 877-960-99-60.

I love to hear from you. 877-960-99-60 and of course the text number 772-49765-5 I'm sorry 4976530 772 4976530 and I got to mention we're on Facebook it's just Facebook.com forward slash Erlon cars and we're on Periscope and we're on Twitter and we're on YouTube so please watch us stream us listen to us whatever you want to do How are we doing on the postings, Rick? Well, we've got one question so far from Ernesto. He's actually asking, are all Toyota certified,

let me get this right, are all collision centers at a Toyota dealership, Toyota certified, and if not, what's the difference between a certified and non-certified one? And he's actually got a follow-up on that, asking, why do the insurance adjusters seem to underestimate the time for repair and cost compared to the Collision Center estimate. He says he understands it may change due to unseen damage once the repair starts. Before we get to that, I'm going to ask Doug and Nick to hold on, and we'll be right with you. Alan?

Okay, addressing the certified shop first, the difference between a certified and a non-certified, and we'll just stick with Toyota dealers, is your agreement to repair vehicles in a safe and ethical manner. You can lose your certification, say if you use heat to straighten a frame rail. You can't do that anymore. Back in the old days. Don't get too technical on a cell. Yeah. Yeah.

The big difference is just adhering to ethical standards in the repair. And also the training of the technicians and the estimating staff and the management staff and all that. What was the second question? He was asking, why do the insurance adjusters seem to underestimate the time for repair and cost? The answer to that question, there's an evolution involved there. It used to be they would do it to save a little bit of money. If they got it close, say you had a $1,000 repair and they wrote $850. Most body shops aren't going to stop the repair process.

and production in their shop to get that $150. That's kind of how it used to be. They knew what the damage was. They'd get it close and just hope the body shop wouldn't bother. But that's evolved. Now you have two other entirely different reasons. Now, one is, and I love people in the insurance industry, I deal with them every day,

but a lot of it is incompetence and a lack of knowledge about the repair process. More often than not, your insurance appraiser that comes to a body shop to inspect a car for damage is somebody that's got a two-year business degree, and they're really good with a computer, and they send them to a few classes on how to use the software, and they send them out to the wolves, the wolves being the body shops. Well, let's wrap that up as quick as we can. We have two callers here, and this was a tech, so we can get back to that after we take our callers. Okay, remember, ladies and gentlemen, 877-960-99-60, we're going to go to Doug, and he is a regular caller from Boca. Good morning, Doug. Hi, good morning.

This is Doug, and Ollie is sitting right beside me. Hello. And I have a question for your dealership. My mom started up wanting to get a Camry in dealing with Josh, and basically what happened, I guess, is you didn't have. a color that she wanted in the dealership and so I guess Josh was dealing with it but now Jim is dealing with what I'm trying to do is help my mom get this car because Monday she has to turn in her rental car oh and what the rental car company did yeah well it's kind of a mess with the rental car company company but

So what I'm trying to do is, now, I hope I'm not overstepping my boundaries here. I did find a Camry that she wants at a competitive dealership near you. The thing is, I want to go with you guys, and I don't know how we can do this. Now, I guess the only one that was available to her was gray, and she didn't want her. Yeah, that's common that most dealers cooperate with each other. And I'd say about half the sales average car dealer make. They swap, they call them dealer trades with other dealers. There's a huge number of combinations of colors and equipment and models of cars.

Dealer can't afford to stock, you know, 1,000 or 2,000 cars, generally speaking. So they trade back and forth. So, yeah, we can trade with the other dealer to get, the right color for your mom, and all car dealers do that. It's very common, no problem at all. And typically, when you buy a car, Doug, from any dealer, if you're buying a car and you're in a rental car, they'll loan you a car. It's really no sense when you're paying money for a rental right now.

If you're buying a car from me or any other dealer, they'll give you a demonstrator or something to drive temporarily until the exact car that you want to buy comes in. So all of those problems can be resolved. That's great, but it wasn't offered to her at the time. And so the thing is, I think what they said is it could take up the 12 days. But I did find the one that she wanted at a competitive dealer that's very close to you. Okay.

And I'm just trying to help her out because she kind of... Well, that's not a problem. Well, I'll tell you, after the show you call me, give me the name of the dealer. and we will a dealer trade with that dealer and cut that time short. I'm not sure why they thought it was going to take so long, but I'm glad you'll let me know about that.

Awesome. Okay, well that's why I called because I know you solved problems. Well, thank you. Thank you. Actually, that was the rental company is doing. Oh, yeah, the rental company. One more thing. The rental company parked the car right near a wall, and my mom is, you know,

she's in her 80s and basically what happened is she pulled out and she scraped the car a little bit on the wall which is not a good thing and so now she has to pay for the damage on the car but I think the rental company which was enterprise should have parked a car in the front so she didn't have to negotiate you know that's a good point good point well we'll take a look at the scratches and see if we can't help her we can talk to the rental company, and we can also take a look at the scratch and see the cost, but we'll help her any way we can, and I agree with you. Parking is so close to make it difficult for an elderly person to get in and out.

They shouldn't have done that. You're exactly right. Okay, well, I appreciate you, and Ollie says hello. Oh, thank you. Ollie is a kitty cat for you folks that don't know, Ollie, and one of the finest cats of all time. So, Ollie, there he is. Okay, Doug, Sam, Holly, call again. Thanks very much. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank all of you for tuning in to Earl Stewart on cars this morning. You know you're a very important part of the show, and we want to share this excitement with you of us being in a new studio.

And remember, ladies, I offered you $50 for the first two new female callers this morning, 877-960-99-60, and a shout-out to Rudy. thank you so much for your help. We're going to go to Nick, and Nick is calling from Cambridge, and I believe that that is just a little town in Maine. Good morning, Nick. Hi, good morning. This is next I've called before. I'm in Cambridge in the greater Boston area. How are you all doing? Thank you for joining us. Hi. So I wanted to ask, I was talking to a buddy that was down in the South Florida region. about off-lease only. And I know that you did a mystery shop there

and that they were less than forthcoming about the issue with the Chicata, you know, recall and, you know, having cars that didn't even have parts available or fixes available. But what I'm wondering is if you could talk more about is what happens when an OEM grounds a lease return vehicle at their dealership? Because one of my friends have worked at a major Toyota dealership

was telling me that they, oftentimes, the best cars don't even make it to the auction, that as part of their effort to keep the values of their cars up, all of the manufacturers have these proprietary internal offers, that the dealer that grounds the unit gets first dibs on it, then it goes on this internal site, and then if it doesn't go there, Toyota Financial Services picks the unit up, and then we'll send it to the auction. And what my point to him, what I was kind of impressive on him, was that, well, the cars that end up at Offlease Only are the cars that the dealers in that manufacturer's network passed on. And, you know, they're the ones that have full access to the service history.

They can see with a lot more detail than URI or offlease only, you know, where the car's been, what's been done to it. You know, is there any truth to that? I mean, is that a major force with, you know, how. cars-off lease, you know, dealers that look at them and appraise them for their, you know, used car a lot? You know, I can speak for Florida, and in Florida,

the leasing companies are required to sell the cars at auction. There's a liability that they have. They have to be sure that they maximize the value of the car at the end of the lease. If they don't want to be accused

of, remember that the lessee has an option to purchase. And the option to purchase is fixed in the lease contract. Sometimes at the end of the lease, it can be an attractive price. The market value could be much higher than the residual value, which would be the option price to purchase, and that's a bonus for the lessee. Usually it's the other way around, but it nevertheless is part of the contractual lease agreement. back years and years ago, the leasing companies would play games with these off-lease lease cars and they would maybe sell them to a dealer at a subsidize or lower price than they

should. The amount that is paid on the lease return is supposed to be fair market value, and the leasing companies are liable for that. In Maine, I'm not sure what the state law, or if there's a federal law that trumps the state law, I'm not sure. But I would be surprised if Toyota leasing in the state of Maine is not trying to maximize the price on the vehicle. Remember, the leasing company is like a separate entity, it's a total separate entity from the dealership. And a dealer, if a dealer were high bidder, then I suppose state law, may permit them to buy the car. In Florida, I can't buy

a car as a dealer. I have to give the car back to the leasing company, be it to a leasing or whoever is a leasing company, and they have to run through a public auction. I mean, other than the issue with the Chicago, I mean, they're selling, what,

3,000 cars a month, I mean, I guess it stands to reason they must be doing something right, but I mean, would you have other, if people had other issues there that have fun to your attention. Yeah, the Takata airbags, interesting enough, if you talk about the value of the cars, you would think that Takata Airbag recall

or even a Takata Airbag recall with an unfixable situation would have a lower market value. Because of the total ignorance of most people about the Takata issue, and because the dealers are not disclosing this and don't have to disclose it, perfectly legal to sell a car with a defective dangerous recall, including Takata. So if things were fair and honest and disclosure was total, a car with a dangerous recall would have much less of a market value.

But today, you can run a car through the auction with a Takata airbag recall and get the same money as a car that goes through the auction without a Takata airbag recall. Okay. And I guess my other question is, just then the whole issue of, you know, the lease, off-lease sort of the options that the OEMs have for their specific dealer networks and the virtual online one. Could it be that, in your case, you're with Southeast Toyota, you know, with like the five other states, and then there's, I think, Gulf States, Toyota, and then the rest of the country is Toyota Financial Services. But that also perhaps be parted in the specific case. Are we still talking about value of cars with or without dangerous recalls or Takata airbags? No, no, I'm talking about this with the general concept of that one of your customers,

any Toyota customer for that matter, turns up at Girl suit Toyota, with a, you know, lease unit to be grounded, and then, you know, you as the dealer, my understanding is you get if the customers, obviously, by turning the car in, is elected not to purchase it. the grounding dealer at first did, and then I thought that it would go on like a proprietary sort of, you know, online auction, if you will, just of Toyota dealerships or possibly Lexus dealerships as well, you know, with the idea being that, you know, they would hopefully buy it, sell it at the TC UV unit rather than have them, you know, turn up at the auction, and then there's, of course, option fees, transport fees, and, you know,

what have you, that it's better for all parties if they can keep the units out of the auction. The procedure with Southeast Toyota is when a car comes back, and this is the five southeastern states, it must return to a Toyota dealer, and they will do an inspection on the car, and they will write up what has to be paid by the lessee because of maybe tires are too thin, not much tread, and unusual wear and tear, beyond normal, wear and tear, dense and scratches, things of this nature. After that, they go to the auction. And the dealer, if the lessee does not

exercise their option to buy, then the dealer will, the leasing company will pick the car up at the dealership and take it to the auction. So the individual dealers do not buy the cars. They're not offered that option to buy the car by Southeast Toyota. Hmm. Okay. Well, that's interesting

I guess they do. I know I call the a couple months ago about the multiple security deposits and maybe I guess it sounds like everything with South East Toyota is very different than Toyota financial. Yeah. No, I I'm going to say I'm pretty sure

this is state law and I think it covers all manufacturers. Okay, well at any rate I enjoy your opinion and I appreciate all that you do to help the public and you know, you reach as far outside the South Florida region. Well, I hope I answered your questions.

I get the feeling that there's still some question, but I don't know exactly what I can answer. There is no funny business going on, to my knowledge, with any of the leasing companies. The cars come back, they go to auction, and it's a bid process. Auction fees, by the way, are nominal, especially for a large volume. Toyota leasing would have tens of thousands of cars coming back every year.

and when they go to auction, they probably pay a very nominal auction fee. They could theoretically have their own auctions, but I don't think they do that. All right. Thank you, Earl. Thank you very much for the call. Thanks for the phone call, Nick. Keep on listening. 877-960-9960, or you can text us at 772-497-30. And Meg, we're going to go out to Wellington and join you.

Thank you so much for giving us a call this morning. what can we do for you hi my name is meg and we purchased my son a ford fusion approximately four years ago i don't recall exact age of the car maybe 2007 it's been a good vehicle but and we did get the airbag recall replaced the dakata airbag question now is we're almost finished having it paid off and we would like to trade it in maybe in another 10, 12 months, but the power steering intermittently will go and it makes it difficult to have a reliable car for him going back and forth to school and working. And we brought it in to be fixed and they couldn't repeat the problem, so they said you have to have a code or get us a code number. And we never know

when that's going to happen, we have an extended warranty on it, but they will not replace it unless we get the code or the problem. They will not just replace it, so then we're out of pocket. My concern is the safety issue for him, and I don't want to trade a car in that we know has a problem. I don't feel like that's really morally correct, ethically. Any thoughts? Well, you have to have the car at a dealership or an independent repair company to get an estimate,

and I would probably suggest that you get more than one estimate, depending on the cost. The repair of a power steering system on a Ford Taurus could vary considerably as to what was wrong. I'm going to ask Rick that question. What sort of a range and expense are we looking at? Well, the biggest difficulty she seems to be having is it's an intermittent problem, problem. And it's not occurring when they go to the dealership, you know, when they're taking it into the shop. And unfortunately, the extended warranty companies, in my experience, they're very, very finicky about that. They just, they don't have any wiggle room on saying, oh, okay, we understand that it's an intermittent problem. And we may need to, you know, try different repairs to try to solve this issue. Meg, let me ask you a question, how intermittent is it, if I missed it, and you said it earlier, every other day or every few hours? No, not that all the every few weeks.

Yeah, yeah, that's a tough one there. I was going to suggest that you let the independent mechanic or the dealership drive the car, but you don't want to leave it for weeks and weeks until it happens again. Alan, you got a thought. Well, it sounds to me like the warranty company probably when it does fail, rather than continue to drive it and get it to the dealer, and of course it corrects itself or the computer corrects itself, whatever, when it fails down the car immediately and tow it to the dealer while it's in that failure mode. And even if you don't have coverage through your warranty policy for the tow, it may be worth it for you to spend the $100 to have the car towed while it's failing to the dealer. don't start it, don't do anything until it gets there,

because you could have a $12, $1, $1,800 repair if you need a steering gear or something like that. Yeah, my concern, if I were Meg, what happened on I-95 at 97 miles an hour. Yeah. And, you know, I can see where she's concerned about the safety issue, and you just can't suddenly stop a car sometimes and get out of the car and say come tow it.

But that's a real dilemma. Meg, Rick, is there any kind of monitoring tools, a dealership, can put on a car that, when it occurs, it'll freeze that issue in the computer somehow? Really, not that I'm aware of, unfortunately. They used to have those, but what they did is they integrated monitoring systems into the car. I don't know why it's not storing any sort of a trouble code. What year is that Ford Fusion, ma'am? Megan? I believe it's 2007, approximately.

Okay, so that should be a hydraulic system. Maggie, what I'm going to suggest is, sounds a little shady, but you might want to consider trading that car a little sooner. And if you're really, really concerned about your son's safety, you might start looking at other Ford later model Ford Fusion or whatever you want to buy, bring the car in and get it appraised. get three competitive bids, you know, be sure that you're getting a good price. And so move, you're buying up a few months.

You said you're going to buy a car in a few months anyway. Rather than have months of your son driving the car, worried about a safety, just trade it in. You there, Meg? Trading in a car that isn't really fully functional either, and I don't... Well, it's a moral dilemma. have to tell you. I wish I could give you a clear-cut answer, but it seems to me you're caught between a rock and a

hard place. You're concerned for your son's safety. I totally understand. One solution would be what Alan said is you can just drive it and hopefully you can pull over the side of the road fast enough to have them tow it and then the intermittent condition will be

able to be diagnosed. But that might not happen in a time when he can pull over the side of the road. So So you're going to, you have a, you have to choose between trading in a car that you know to be unsafe or letting your son drive it for a few months until it finally does misbehave and you can have it fixed. And I wouldn't want to be in your shoes. It's a sad situation.

But I can't think of a better magical solution to your problem. Yeah, I kind of thought that would be your thoughts. But I just didn't know if they can find. an issue with it by bringing it to a mechanic intermittent problems are very very difficult and you could spend a lot of time

and a lot of money trying to get something diagnosed and they just can't find it's just like anything else we get them I'm a car dealer in full transparency disclosure I've been a car dealer since 1968 and in my service

department the biggest headache we have are intermittent problems and sometimes yours is particularly difficult because it only occurs every few weeks. It's hard enough to diagnose a problem that occurs every few hours, but every few weeks it's almost impossible until you catch it and the actual act of failure before you can diagnose it and fix it. Okay.

All right. Well, thank you so much. I'm very sorry we couldn't give you a better solution. Meg, are you a first-time caller? No, I am not. I wish I could say I am. I do also. Good luck with that problem, and I hope to hear

from you again. All right. Thank you so much. Have a good day. All right. Have a great day. You know, I know there's a whole lot of texts to get to, but we have one more caller, and it's Bob, and he's calling from Minnesota.

Good morning, Bob. Hello, Bob. Yes, I'm still here. Good. Good morning. What's your question? Good morning. My son has a 2007 Toyota Corolla, and when he got,

200,000 miles the speedometer stopped working. And he was told by a Toyota rep that that's how it's designed. I just found it kind of hard to believe that they would stop at 300,000 miles

because these cars will go beyond that, especially at Toyota. I'm just amazed at... Have you ever heard that before? Alan's shaking his head. I didn't know that. And that's what I say. I always learned something new. Alan, on a 2007 Toyota, you can only go up to 300,000 miles. And they were programmed that way.

That's the dumbest thing I ever heard of. And I'm embarrassed to be a Toyota dealer. Our painter Chuck, his wife Debbie's Corolla, she maintains it meticulously. She got to 300,000. It just stopped. And Mark, our service manager, knew about the problem. that it existed. They don't do them that way anymore, by the way. But he got it replaced for them at no charge. And I think that that's kind of an ongoing deal. You need to go to a car dealer that wants to help you, for one thing,

because it's not a financially profitable thing for the dealer. It's such a small thing, but it's a huge thing if you own the car. But go to a dealer, your local dealer, and tell them, hey, you can Google this. This is not unheard of. What can you do for me? And try to get it replaced at Toyota's expense. If they say, we'll do it. If you pay the first $100, it's worth it. Go ahead and do it.

But try to get them to buy you one. I think you can embarrass them into that. If the dealer will cooperate and then Alan says go to bed for you, that'll work. If they won't, I think you can go to Toyota. directly. The top guy for Toyota in all of North America is Jim Lentz, L-A-N-N-T-Z. And you copy him with some correspondence. He will see it. We've had instances with my customers, and he will actually involve himself, go up high enough in the ranks at Toyota, and if the dealer won't help you, and try to embarrass him into getting you a new odometer,

because it's absolutely stupid that they would have designed the odometer that way. Sure, shows a lack of confidence. Jim. Jim Lentz, Lentz. He is the, I'm not sure. He is in charge of Toyota for all of North America, probably president or executive or whatever. But if you Google him, you'll get his contact information

and send him an email. It's probably just, yeah. I was going to say I'm in the process of looking for a new car and when you go to a dealership of course you can take it out and take a test drive but it just doesn't give you a good idea what the car is like

do most dealers allow you to use it for a couple days possibly or can you rent a car from a dealership so you can get a better feel for it? Most dealers would not let you have it for a couple days. Some would. Remember if they have a demonstration That's one thing. If they don't have a car designated as demonstrator and the particular car you want to drive, they would have to give you a brand new car to drive for two or three days. And that would be a difficulty because of the mileage you would put on the car. Then the next person that wanted to buy it wouldn't want to pay as much money. Renting a car would be a great idea. And I think you're on the right track. Too many people come in and they take a 20-minute demonstration ride, make a decision, and buy a $50,000 car.

That's a bad idea. And I think you're exactly right. Even if you got a car that wasn't exactly the same, but it was the same year and make and model, but it might have different accessories. You should take a car out and drive it for several hours, if not overnight. And drive it in the same conditions that you normally drive your car,

highway driving, residential driving, the roads that you normally go over in your daily whatever you do. And that way you'll know whether you like to. car we have a lot of people myself included as i say i'm a car dealer they'll come in and buy a car they love it uh they drive it for a couple hours and then a week later they find out there was something about that car they didn't notice it might be the visibility out of the rear window uh you never know so stick to your idea of driving the car for a day or two okay way i appreciate your assistance thank you very much bob thanks for the call appreciate it please call again

877960, or you can text us at 772-497-6-530. Speaking of texts, we have them stacked up over there. We've got a few. Let's see, the first one, Tim is asking, Earl, what got you started in selling Toyotas, and what were you doing before you got a Toyota dealership? I was a Pontiac dealer, Tim, and I try to make this fast, It's one of my favorite stories.

I was actually coming back as a Pontiac dealer from a late-night poker game, and a friend of mine said, would you be interested in buying a toilet dealership? This is in 1975. And I said, I'll buy anything if the price is right. So he gave me a friend of his friend's name. I called the guy, his name was Jerry Bean and Dick Raffo. I called Dick Raffo in New York. and long story short

within about a month I bought myself a Toyota dealership that was back when Toyota dealerships weren't very popular and Toyota wasn't very popular so my timing was right excellent okay Steve has an 07 Lexus

E350 and he just bought a new Samsung cell phone, a brand new smartphone and he says his Bluetooth cannot connect he went into the Lexus dealership and they couldn't get it to work either. And they say there are no more updates available for his radio for connecting his Bluetooth. And he's wondering, what are his options for getting this straightened

around? I'm a little shocked. Samsung is a popular phone, and I see no reason. I would check with another Lexus dealership, and I would also contact Lexus directly. It doesn't sound to me like a satisfactory answer. Right, because those phones should be backwards compatible. Yeah. And the Lexus Bluetooth system should be straightforward enough that you should still accept it. Otherwise, some of your options include an aftermarket Bluetooth adapter that will play through your radio, or possibly even considering the idea of simply replacing the radio with an aftermarket unit that would be a lot less expensive than any factory units, and it would have all the latest technology for Bluetooth and such things as the Google CarPlay or Apple CarPlay.

And I will say this, that one of the weak points in the modern cars is a whole Bluetooth connection thing. We get complaints all the time. When you go to a dealership or wherever you're going for help, assistance, and getting your Bluetooth connected to whatever you want to connect it to, find the person, hopefully, in the dealership that knows what he's talking about. If you get the wrong person, they will be unable to do it for you. In my own dealership, I had a service advisor, we call them assistant service managers or salesmen, that are recommended to one of my customers that they buy a new radio because it wouldn't connect.

Come to find out that it was just an issue that he didn't understand. So you get a lot of bad advice in car dealerships today because of this new technology of Bluetooth. Get a second, third, or fourth opinion before you give up. And certainly don't buy another radio. And believe it or not, one of the best resources for extra information on that is YouTube. You'd be amazed at how many times, because there are so many different phones out there. I can't even come close to memorizing how to make them all work. So I go on YouTube to get advice on how to make all the various different phones connect with cars.

Very good. Next time. Let's see. James is asking, how do mega dealers afford such a large inventory? he assumes the interest cost on paying for those cars would be very high, and yet they always advertise super low prices. The mega dealers do have large inventories. I mean, typically a car dealer will have a 60-day supply, meaning if they sell 100 cars a month, they'll have 200 cars in inventory. But their dealers that sell 1,000 cars a month, believe it or not,

and they would have probably 2,000 cars in inventory. Actually, interest rates today on financing new cars in inventory, they call it floor plan, are still at historic lows. And car dealers right now are only paying like three or four percent interest. And compared to years ago, as a car dealer, I can remember back in the 70s, I was paying 20 percent interest on my inventory. And when I say that now, I choke and have palpitations. But the car dealers today really got it easy. because the cost of money is so low. Okay, and next one, Andrez, on Facebook is asking,

he's setting his new vehicle owner's manual, and he's looking at the maintenance section. He says, he doesn't see any notes to have the first oil change completed before the typical 6,000-mile interval. Is the initial oil change at, say, 500 or 1,000 miles required these days? He says, I was very concerned with the oil in my car as it looked very dark. I changed the oil and actually only about three and a half quarts came out from a possible 4.75 quarts as per the manual. And he only had about 2,000 miles on the car.

Well, I would be checking with the dealership and find out why such little amount of oil came out of that car. But normally with most due cars, you're totally fine to follow that owner's manual and have your first oil change done at whatever interval they say, it's 5,000 miles like a lot of them, or six or 10,000 miles, or even in some cases they have it at 7,500 or other intervals. What model car was that making? He doesn't say what the model was. One of the things that we've, I'm shocked about are the variability between an exact same, two different cars and how much oil they'll burn.

And based on the tolerances of the engine and things like that, you can see a car and Rick, correct me if I'm wrong, that can burn a cord oil in 3,000 miles. Another will burn a cord oil in 10,000 miles or 20,000 miles. So individual cars will burn oil at a different rate, and you need to monitor it and have the dealership or independent mechanic monitor your oil and see how fast you're burning. Absolutely. Let me add something to that.

When you're doing a home oil change, oftentimes there's a couple things. One is when a dealer or a repair shop does it, your car is perfectly flat, and that's how it's designed to have the oil drained. If you're doing an oil change at home in your driveway, the odds are it's probably not perfectly flat. And you could have half a quarter, three quarters of a quart of oil sitting at the back or the front of the oil. Like in San Francisco. Yeah. Like in San Francisco. But most of our driveways are angled, too, because the flood stuff.

The other thing is when a repair shop or a dealer changes your oil, it's usually on a warm automobile. The engine's warmed up. The oil flows better, so you get more oil out as well. Now, most of these are zero-weight oils now. They're almost watery, but even sewing machine oil, the same thing. You thicken it up, it flows better. So you've got a couple of things lined up against you. They're doing home oil changes versus a repair shop to get all the oil out of the car.

That's very true. Excuse me for a minute, Rick. To the young lady that was holding from Alabama, please give us a call back. All of the calls are very important. And we have a caller from Jupiter that's been holding for quite some time. And his name is Alan. Good morning, Alan. Alan from Jupiter, we got you on the line.

Hey, Alan. Okay, folks, we've got some new equipment here today, and maybe we're not functioning up 100%. We had a call from Alabama that we don't have. We have Alan, who we thought was on the line. Alan, we can't hear you if you can hear us. Call back again. I can hear you?

Oh, good morning. Can you hear you? We hear you now. Thank you. Sorry about that. Good morning. I read Well, we lost you again, Alan.

New control room, new high-tech stuff here. Not working too well. My apologies. I'm sure once we get all this fancy new equipment working, it'll be very smooth. Yeah, and I agree with you. I'm going to give a shout out to Rudy. I'm expecting a call to come in, and that is from Justin Lynn just shortly. If you could patch that through to us, ladies and gentlemen,

Your calls are very important, and for the ones that we couldn't get to, like the lady in Alabama, please be patient and give us a call back at 877-960, or you can text us at 772-497-6-530. We have an exciting show this morning. We have a great mystery shopping report, and so much more. Now back to the recovering car dealer. Yeah, again, my apologies. anybody that's called but not able to get through

we're in a new studio and we accept full responsibility for this and we do apologize we will prioritize your call we're answering some text now and postings on Facebook and Twitter and whatnot but the phone calls we will prioritize

and Nancy has the screen soon as a phone call pops up we'll interrupt whatever we're doing and take her call so if you were cut off or you were listening and couldn't hear us, please call back, and we will take your call immediately. 877-960-99-60-877-960. And please text us at 772-497-6-5-30. That's 772-497-65-30. Let's go back to the text until we get another call, Rick.

Okay. Andrew has put in with a little... update here it's a 2019 Hyundai Elantra GT with a 1.6 liter turbo and he says he changed the wheel on a slope driveway but he had the car on ramps and he says he checked it with a level to see that it was level. Good call. We're on the same track. I would say so. In that case I would again I would consult with the dealership to try to find out what's going on and why it seems that that car was so low on oil for what should have been in there. Yeah, exactly.

They'd probably want to fill it up with oil to the right level and then drive it and see how quickly it's burning. Sometimes if it burns oil too fast, you've got a situation that can be corrected under warranty or otherwise, and sometimes I'll just tell you, unfortunately, well, you've just got one of those cars that burns a lot of oil. It's embarrassing to me when I have to tell my customer that,

but we will have the exact same year-make model car. One will burn it, you know, quarter oil and 5,000 miles. Another one will burn the cord oil in 10,000 miles. Makes no sense. Yep. Okay. Well, Scott Anderson is asking, can brake rotors on new cars qualify for a warranty item?

He says his front brakes are shaking very badly when applied, and he checked and he has around 85% to 90% of the pads left, and the car only has about 20,000 miles. which he bought brand new. And I can answer that one. Absolutely yes. That is a warrantable condition on just about every new car that I know of.

So I would advise taking it to the dealership and let them know what's going on and they should be able to verify that condition and straighten it out for you quickly and easily. Are we out of tax? Actually, I do have one more. I'm kind of waiting for an update from a question that I asked John on YouTube. Excuse me, Rick.

Sure. Justin, if you could please give us a call back again, we're not 100% this morning. This is a brand new studio. And if you called 877-960, that was the correct number. So give us a call again. Please, we do know that you did call twice. Yeah, Justin Lynn is an attorney that we asked to call. and Justin, if you're listening, please forgive us and try again.

Justin Lynn was going to address the Takata Airbag issue question we have with some of the reasons as to why this Takata Airbag is not made, it's not illegal to sell a car with a defective Takata Airbag, or for that matter, why it's not illegal to sell any car with a dangerous recall. There are even cars out there on the road being sold as I speak to use car buyers, that have dangerous recalls with no fix available. And in the United States of America, it's perfectly legal to do that. Makes no sense.

Justin is an attorney. We love to hear from them. So if you're out there, Justin, try again. I think what might happen is the calls back up. We get too many calls, and then you get a busy signal or we hang up on you. 877-960-99-60. 877-960-99-60. and please call us back or anybody

call us back. We will prioritize. Yeah. Now, Justin, I'm really sorry that that line's still busy, but if you could try one more time, we may have to resort to texting. At any rate, ladies and gentlemen, please take advantage of that number,

877-960-99-60, and you are an important part of the show. Did you know that between 2015 and 18, the top four years for recalls, it was the most recalls in U.S. history. You don't wake up without seeing a recall. I mean, it's everywhere, and it's an important topic. So I hope we can get to that topic with Justin.

And remember, we do have the mystery shopping report coming up, and we'll get to that also. Now back to the recovering car dealer. How are we doing on tax, Rick? Okay, I've got two more here. John is asking. He says he saw a true car that had price

higher than three different dealership website prices and I was verifying with me. He says it's three dealers over on the west coast of Florida, three different dealers that had lower website prices than true car. Unfortunately

website prices don't mean much because all car dealers in Florida charge exhaust hidden fees on top of the advertised price. On top of the advertised price and the quoted price. You call on the phone, you'll walk into the dealership. The price that the salesman tells you is understated by sometimes thousands of dollars. So your true car price is probably a good price, although I do say this, whether it's true car or Costco or consumer reports,

wherever your third-party source is, Cars.com, there are a lot of third-party pricing sources. is out there. Shop and compare that price, just like you would, a price that was quoted by your local dealer. But online prices or advertised prices, they're all understated by, there's a dealer in South Florida that has a $3,000 dealer fee. And when he advertises a price and you go on the, buy the car at that advertised price, is $3,000 higher. Hidden fees are the way to add profit to an advertised price, and they should be illegal, just like unfixed Tricot Airbags. Any more text on, Rick? We do there, coming in hot and heavy. Amy is asking. She says, I have five months left on my Buick Encore lease, and she's able to turn the car in early through a pull-ahead program. But she says she doesn't want to lease another Buick or GMC car.

She says, I would love to get another Toyota, have had several Toyotas over the past 35 years. What's the best way to handle this? Is it best to just be patient? I do not want to roll the five payments into a new lease or purchase price. What's her name? Amy. Amy.

Okay, excuse me for interrupting, but we do have some callers on hold, and Rudy, I have lost that screen. What we're going to do is... Amy, I'm going to get back to your text, but we have to prioritize our callers, so we will take the calls. And what we're going to do is we're going to give Justin a call right now, but I do not have the callers up on my screen right now Rudy if you can patch that over to me I'd appreciate it okay do we have any other callers no calls at all on the screen okay then I will answer Amy's question I just forgot what her question was she has a Buick encore with five lease payments left

exactly you're caught in the lease trap Amy you've got a car that is from a particular manufacturer, General Motors Buick, and they have you locked in. If you don't buy that car from them, they're going to charge a lease disposition fee. They've given you a special now, a special deal to lure you in to lease another Buick, and that's the reason the manufacturers and the dealers love leasing. I always say all things being equal, I'd recommend you buy the car. You're out of the clutches of the dealership and the manufacturer when you buy a car more than you are the lease. With the lease, they got a string. It's like a yo-yo. And you've got to keep coming back and leasing another car or buying another car. You're just going to have to bite the bullet.

If you want to buy a Honda or Toyota something else, you will have a lease disposition fee. And then be very careful when you turn that lease in. They'll go over that car with a fine tooth comb. And if you have what they define to be abnormal wear and tear, your tires are too thin, a stain on your upholstery, too many miles. they're going to hit you with a big charge. When you break off with whoever you're leasing from, General Motors Ford, Toyota, they will penalize you. And that's the reason I don't like leasing that much. Okay, excuse me. Ladies and gentlemen, we do apologize.

We are trying to adjust to a brand new studio. And if you have called and we lost you, please give a call back. And I believe that Lee is holding right now. Good morning, Lee. Lee, are you still there? Oh, boy. This is very embarrassing that we are having this problem.

You may be there at least sometimes I speak like I'm speaking now and suddenly your voice comes and you're probably, I hope you're listening to me and now I hear a dial tone. There he is. Chaotic first day in our new studio. We knew it, though. We knew it was going to happen.

We know it, I guess, if it's going to happen, just like buying a new car, you get some few bugs, and you get out fixed, and hopefully we'll get this thing fixed, and it won't happen again. Fortunately, the text are working pretty well. I think we have one text. We have an answer over there, Rick? Yeah, and I just lost it for a moment here. I'm working on computer issues, too. Let me say something. This is being an interesting day. Let me say something. One of the calls that we really look forward to from Justin Lennon, an attorney, he's an attorney of both New York and Florida.

We had some discussions during the week, and he was going to help me address the issue of the legality of selling cars all over the United States with dangerous recalls. Common sense tells me and tells you, I believe, our listeners, it should be illegal to sell me a product that can kill me. I mean, you're not going to be able to buy a product most other, I'm sure that if you had a baby carriage or you had a loaf of bread, if you ate it, it would kill you, it'd be illegal to sell. Why is it legal to sell me a car or you a car with a defective to cut airbag that can explode in your face and kill you, and there's no fix available? There is no reason for it. So Justin Lynn is trying desperately to call and address this issue. I have another theory that I wanted to talk to an attorney about, and that is on the other side of the law, if I am president of Auto Nation, the largest retailer of cars in the world, and I have cars in inventory that had defective tecotta airbags or other dangerous recalls,

and I don't sell them. Am I subject to a suit by the stockholders because it's my fiduciary responsibility to make a profit for automation. And here's a car that's perfectly legal to sell, but I make a moral decision. I won't sell it. I'm going to ground those cars

and it cost automation profit. The profits go down, the stock price goes down, and I get sued by the shareholders. That was the other legal issue that I wanted to talk to an attorney about. Fortunately, the attorneys are unable to get through on the lines, and we will, if we can't address it this week, we'll address it next week. We're in a new studio, and things aren't working too well. We're getting there, folks.

We're working on it. Can't even get through on the text now, huh? I had to restart the whole computer system here. I'm bringing it back up. Okay, excuse me, guys, ladies and gentlemen, we, again, reiterate, we are having some difficult. This is a brand new studio, and I got word that things have been frozen up, and we are expecting Justin Lin, the attorney, from New York, to give us a call, but we're having difficulties with that.

So please bear with us back to the recovering car dealer. I think Ellen had a boy. Yeah, I just wanted to go back to an anonymous question that we got the other day. A guy was, he rode in, he was questioning whether he should pressure, wash his car or not when he does his cleanups at home. And like most of us in South Florida, we all have pressure washers because we're sidewalks and our roofs mold and so on and so forth. And I gave him kind of a short answer, a written answer. But the long answer is don't pressure wash your car unless there's a specific reason that you need to. Whenever you

pressure wash a car, there's so many problems that can happen, especially if you do it under the hood. If you get some of these electronic components wet or the wiring harnesses, it can make your car undrivable. We've gotten coils wet before we figured out that cars were evolving and they can't take that high pressure anymore under the hood. So never spray any water even with a garden hose under your hood anymore. Those days are gone. But as far as the exterior of the car, the professionals do it for speed just to get that car rinsed off really fast and move on that, you know, they're doing it for money. If you have the time at home, don't pressure wash your car. Around the windows, you can blow the rubber gaskets out, get water in your car. If you have any kind of a paint defect at

all, that pressure washer is going to make it real obvious because it's going to blast the paint off of your car. And pressure washing bugs off the front of your car is not a good idea. You've got a soften those guys up with some soap, and you've got to scrub them off with elbow grease. And that's my long answer. Thank you, Alan. Okay. Alan stretched that out because we have no callers and no texture. Actually, we do.

We have been waiting for Justin, for Justin Lynn, and we thank him so much for, well, calling in. And sorry for all the difficulty, Justin. And Justin's giving us a call. As I said, Justin Lynn, a new attorney, I'm out of breath. Well, let me handle it. Justin, let's start out with this question, which I posed earlier because we couldn't get you through on the phones, and I apologize for that. This question, Justin, if you can answer it for me, why is it legal for any car dealer in the United States to sell anybody a car with a dangerous recall that can not? not be fixed.

So good morning. How are you guys doing this morning? I'm doing fine. I'm sorry that you had to try so hard to get through. And I thank you very, very much. And I should have introduced you better, but I'm kind of out of breath like Nancy. Justin is an attorney.

He's licensed in New York and Florida. He's a consumer advocate attorney. And he's a great attorney, and he cares about his clients, and he cares about car buyers. And he's going to try to help us out. Yeah, so from my understanding is there's no law that stops someone from selling a used car

with a known defect. There is a federal law that prevents dealers from selling brand new cars to consumers when they know there's a defect or defect was issued or recall was issued. But as far as used car goes, and that's really the problem here is because once the car is sold and it's in the used car market, the dealer has less of a ability to keep an eye on that car and get it out of circulation. So really the big issue here are the used cars, and there's no federal law that stops a dealer from reselling a used car with a known defect.

Justin, let me ask you this. You're the attorney, but my impression was that our laws are based on British Congress, common law, case law, et cetera. And there are certain laws that are almost implied, inherent. I thought, and I guess I'm wrong, I thought there must be some law somewhere that prevents a company from knowingly selling a product that can injure the buyer or kill the buyer. I know that there's a big hoop law in the media anytime. There's a toy, a child's toy, baby toy, be it a crib or a high chair or whatever that can kill people.

If I'm a toy salesman and I've got a toy store and I have a rattle that I'm selling the babies and I know this rattle can choke the baby and kill it. Is it legal for me to sell it if no one passes a law that says it's illegal? So that's actually illegal as well. The federal government passed in 2008 under George Bush, the Consumer Protection Safety Improvement Act. And that Protection Act for consumers is more focused on children's toys like you're talking about and other direct consumer products.

And it says that it's illegal for anyone to resell or sell a product with a dangerous or open recall. But the problem with that law is, as you can imagine, with dealers having great lobbyists, is that that law doesn't apply to car dealers. I think there's a carve-out that shows that a car is not a consumer product under that act, that protection act. So it's not the type of act that would or the type of thing that would fall under the act.

Very interesting. Well, once... But I can tell you... Go ahead. Go ahead, Judge. I'm sorry. So I can also tell you, though, kind of in that same direction, that on June 26th of this year, 2019, Senators Blumenthal and Markey

introduced in the Senate the used car safety recall repair act. And this act is particularly interesting because it's exactly what you're talking about. It's exactly the fight that you're fighting. And if you look at the act and the language that it's proposing, there's an

acknowledgement that what's happening is people are selling used cars and they're doing it with known recalls and people are being hurt. And that acknowledges under federal law that they can do this so that this is a piece of legislation that's attempting to prevent car dealers and manufacturers from selling these cars with open recalls. Wow. Well, sure. Hold. But passes. I'm delighted to hear that. I'm just baffled as to what the logic could have been. I think you said, and you answered the question. Lobbyists have lobbied the legislatures to give a little outage for car dealers. I mean, if you sell a consumer product, I don't know what a car is if it's not a consumer product, but they define cars as non-consumer products. That's the most

dastardly thing I can imagine something that kill you more people are killed in cars than probably any other consumer product well you know I was thinking the same thing and I also I found some other interesting stuff this morning did you hear about the the FTC decision that allows the dealers and the manufacturers to advertise their cars as certified or safe as long as they disclose the recall I did And I know Rosemary Sheehan, who is the president of CRS, I always forget the acronym, citizens against repair, safety and repair of cars, something like that. But she's out of California, and she's the one that led the suit against the Federal Trade Commission,

and she lost. And again, I had to do with lobbying, I'm sure, by the auto manufacturers and the car dealers. Yep, absolutely. You know, I think you talked about what can be done, and I think, in my opinion, and maybe I'm biased because I'm a plaintiff's lawyer, but I think we serve a really important role in society, and that's kind of the keeping large companies in check and ensuring that even when there's not a law on point that large companies are making safe products for their concerns. consumers because when a company's on notice that they have a dangerous product or that their product can hurt people, they have a certain duty then to protect people. And they also have a duty to manufacture a car that's crash-worthy, meaning that it can go through a crash and not make you more injured.

So I think what's, aside from the federal legislation and state legislation helping this situation. I think there needs to be a more concerted effort on plaintiff's lawyers to try to find what could either be a class action or what would be, what I've had a lot of luck with lately is federal RICO, which is the racketeering influence corruption organization act. And what that is is people hear, oh, you know, you got arrested for RICO charges because you're a criminal, right? So the thing that there is the law is civil RICO, and that allows a lawyer or somebody to sue a company and allege that they're engaging in illegal conduct. And that illegal conduct is causing damages. And what's really, really powerful is that civil RICO gives you

three times or treble damages and an award of attorney's fees. So, you know, if you could, So if you can allege, like, that a large national car dealer is breaking laws in several states, all you have to show is two criminal infractions to show a criminal enterprise. So if, say, CarMax is selling cars in one state that's illegal to do that, and then they're doing it in another state, and then you can find something else that they could have been doing wrong. People use investigators to search through different things, to find different criminal acts. And once, the thing with Civil Rico is when you get them on the hook for it,

it's an incredibly powerful tool to force somebody into compliance. Because if not, like I said, they're going to be paying three times the damages and attorney's fees. And a little case could turn into a multi-million dollar, billion dollar case against the auto dealers and manufacturers. No wonder the price of Ford stock is dropping. They were manufacturing cars with knowingly to manufacturing cars with defective transatlantic. they can or injure their customers, and that's more or less a matter of record. They're a natural for a RICO civil suit, right? Yeah, you know, obviously, and you want to be looking for one of the bigger dealers, too,

that have the ability to either pay out on this and to continue to stay open and to make a decision that they're going to do something different. Because, you know, if you put somebody out of business, you know, that's a good message to the rest of the community, but also it's what helps is. when the big leaders in the industry take charge and really point the rest of the industry in the right direction. And if someone like Ford or GM gets tagged with a ridiculously large judgment or settlement, then they're going to make a decision, just like they did in the Ford Pinto case, that

they have to do better for the community because, you know, ultimately what we're talking about is a betrayal of the public trust here. We go and we buy a car hoping that and expecting that it's safe. safe for us. And at some point, when that trust is betrayed, we need to be able to expect more from the car dealers, but the manufacturers as well. You're listening to Justin Lynn. He's a plaintiff's attorney. He's a very fine attorney, cares about his clients, and he has a license of practice law in New York and Florida. and he's helping us now answer this question about why it's legal to sell cars with dangerous recalls,

and it is legal, and we're talking about ways we can get around this. Justin, let me ask you another question about legality. Am I right that a public company like AutoNation has a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders to earn money by legally anything legal that they can do to maximize the profit, the return on investment of the stockholders. Therefore, if they have cars in their inventories or used car inventories that do have dangerous recalls, if they made the moral decision to sideline these cars and not retail them, they theoretically could be sued because they were not fulfilling their obligation to their stockholders.

So, you know, I'll pick apart a couple of things that you said there, and I'll start with the point that I, um, I, um, I, I don't think that phrasing it as a moral decision is the right way to go about creating the change you want, even though it's true, right? You want this is a moral decision for you. But as a CEO or a leader of a company, there's also the thing called the business judgment rule, and it allows you as a CEO or a leader of a company to make business judgment, and you're given an incredible amount of discretion because you're the leader.

leader of a company, you need the discretion to be able to make sound business judgments. And it's a really high threshold for the stockholders to come back later and say, you made the wrong business judgment. And in this case, the business judgment we're talking about is whether or not we should sell cars with open recalls. And if you say, I'm not going to do it because I think it's a moral issue, then you're bringing up issues of whether your business judgment. was a sound and in the best interest of the company.

But if you phrase it, to me, what seems more appropriate is as a risk to the company and a financial, potential financial burden that the company can experience, because the reality is, I would love to get one of these cases where somebody is seriously injured or unfortunately passes away, and a car dealer sold a used car and knew about it. I'm pretty sure that I would go after them very aggressively, and I would try to get an incredible amount of compensation for my client because I care about, you know, getting the right results. Well, I've got a case for you right now, Jess,

and we mystery shop CarMax four times, and three of the four times they deliberately misrepresented cars as having fixable safety recalls, and they were not fixable because the inflators were not available. but we can talk about that later. I just want to mention one thing back on the responsibility of the CEO to make a profit for the stockholders. Michael Jackson, the CEO of AutoNation, about a year and a half ago,

made that decision that he was going to withhold from sale all of the vehicles with dangerous airbag recalls. He would not sell any cars with dangerous to cut airbag recalls. And he stuck to that, the reason I remember, because I'm the only other car dealer that did it, Automation and my dealership, and we're still not selling those cars. But Michael Jackson made the decision not to do it,

held those cars off the market for a year, and then got on CNBC and announced to the world that he was reversing that decision, that he was going to start selling the cars, and he was sorry he had to do it, but it was costing the company a lot of money. Yeah, you know, I think, think that's also another thing where it comes to a similar situation as the Ford Pinto case

where somebody's making calculated decisions, and unfortunately those calculated decisions, the equations involve people's life. And they're saying that they can sell a certain amount of cars with a recall open and make a certain amount of money so that their investors are happy. And, you know, if they get sued, who cares, it's not as much money as if, one, they don't sell the cars or, two, their investors sue them for securities fraud or something similar to that. So they're making a calculated decision where they're taking into account the value of somebody's life, and they're deciding that they're going to sell the car despite that and that they have to. And one of the things that is really interesting to me about that particular case is, it unfortunately now, set them up for incredible liability because it's similar to a case where an apartment complex knows that it's a dangerous neighborhood and they decide to hire a security guard to protect

that apartment complex. But if at some point that security guard just doesn't show up anymore, they decide they don't want to employ him anymore, or that the security guard isn't adequate enough for what's needed, then the department complex is potentially on the hook because they took a step to try to protect people, and that step was either not enough or that they removed it without reason. I see. So by establishing a duty to protect the consumer like they did, they almost put themselves in a position, in a worst-off position moving forward if somebody buys a new car or a used

car from them in the future that has a recall in their seriously injured. or pass away. Well, there's two class action suits you can look at, Justin. AutoNation and CarMax. We can talk about that later, but thank you very, very much for going through the pain and aggravation of getting through to the radio show with our new studio. I don't know how many times you must have called, but I really appreciate you going to all that trouble.

We'd love to hear from you regularly. I promise you that we'll get this technical problems finished and fixed, and we'll will be able to be reached next week and the week after. So please call again sometime. No worries, Ralph. Can you give me 10 seconds? Sure, absolutely. So I'm, like Earl mentioned,

I'm a personal injury attorney. I'm licensed in Florida and New York. I live in New York and I focus on helping people who were injured while they were in New York who live in Florida. So if you're on vacation or you're here for work and you get injured and you have to go back to Florida,

a lot of Florida lawyers have I have no idea how to handle that case, and that's my focus, is to help people who need help when they were hurt while they were in New York. I also handle a whole ton of other injury cases, but my niche is cases involving Florida and New York. And I'll say this, Nancy and I know, Justin, personally, we knew him before he was an attorney, and we've known them since, and he's one of the good guys. You know, you've got a lot of attorneys out there, but you have some, a few like Justin. really care about his clients. Justin Lynn, L-I-N-N. What's your email address, Justin?

So you can find me online at Justin Lin-L-L-I-N-L-A-W.com. You can call me 561-756-160-A. Or my email address is Justin Lynn-L-L-A-W at g-Mel-A-W at g-Mel-A-W at g-Mel-A-W at g-Mel-A-com. And if any of you didn't get all that written down, you can call me or Nancy or call the show. We'll give you Justin Lynn's contact information. Once again, Justin, thank you very much for what you do and for being so persistent to get through the show this morning.

We all thank you, Justin. From all of us here at Earl Stewart on Cars, thank you so much. Thank you, thank you. You guys. Have a great day. Thank you. Okay. Well, I think that we're going to go to the mystery shopping report in light of

the way things are right now and we'll have just enough time. It's about 936. We've got a couple of texts over here we might be able to have time to get to. Yeah, well let me tell our listeners that you can vote on the mystery shopping report

by texting us at 772-497-6530 and that mystery shopper report is from Garaco Chevrolet in Delray Beach. Now back to Rick. Yeah, we've got a couple of text coming in. We have time. Yeah, we'll kind of zip through on a couple of these. Ronald is asking,

can the finance and insurance insist on dealer add-on fees, such as window tent, after I agreed on a price with the salesman? They can, but you don't have to buy the car from them. This is part of the many, many dirty little secrets car dealers have. Dealer installed options. Hidden fees are probably the biggest, but dealer-install options are a close second.

And it's just totally unconscionable to advertise a car at a price that they won't sell the car for. And the way they bump the profit, hidden fees, a.k.a. dealer fees and dealer-installed options. Nitrogen in the tires, window tent, pinstripes, road hazard insurance. The list goes on and on and on. Dealer-installed accessories are not only a sneaky trick to add to the profit,

but they have very low value and very high price. That's the reason they're dealer-installed. Typically, a package of dealer-installed accessories would have a dealer cost of $100, and they would charge you $1,000, or if it was $200,000, they charge you $2,000. And when you get a price on a car, be sure it is an out-the-door price, plus tax and tag only. I'm going to hold up something for the camera and you can download this

on our Erluncars.com or you can download it at Althodorepriceaffidavit.com www. www. www. Althador Price affidavit.com.

It basically is an affidavit that says the car I'm buying has the complete price that you quoted me and this is the advertised price and it's the quote. price and the only thing you're going to add to that price are government fees and government fees are typically sales tax and license plate but dealer installed options are something they cannot

and should not add to the price we got another one we do uh kit cat is asking will you our dealership earl stewart toyota accept a tecotta airbag recall vehicle on trade-in and if so do you reduce its trade in value. And then what do you do with the unfixable car once you own it? We will not retail a car with a dangerous recall to cut airbag or anything else. When the car comes in, we give the market value appraised price. And interestingly enough, there was a time when the market value appraised price I thought was going to be higher than what the real value of the car was. The fact of the matter is, because of the lack of action by our legislators and regulators on dangerous recall cars, the market value is the same

if the wholesale auctions as if they did or do not have recalled dangerous recalls. So yes, when we trade in a car, we'll accept and we'll give you the market value and then we'll take that car and we'll get it fixed. If it can be fixed, if it can't be fixed, we will sell it at the auction, at the wholesale auction. And let another dealer buy it and they're going to take the car and they're going to retail it. Okay. And the last one we have here is Robbie from Stewart. Kind of a public service announcement that he's got here.

Are you aware that on the news, some states are now charging. He says double or triple, but I looked it up and it's actually quite a hefty amount. For license plates, for people who own alternative fuel vehicles, hybrids, plug-in hybrids, electric cars, because their gasoline revenue, the gasoline tax revenues that those states were normally getting are falling because people are buying these alternative fuel vehicles, the electric vehicles. So a lot of these states, 19 of them now, are charging anywhere from $50 to $200 additional to register your car each year because it is a non-gasoline using car.

Yes, I've heard that. And that's the dumbest thing I've heard. That's the second dumbest thing I've heard. The first one was Toyota building an odometer on 2007 Corolla that would only go up to 300,000 miles. But to charge extra for someone that is trying to reduce energy consumption and have a cleaner environment and charge them a premium because they're not collecting gasoline tax, it's pure stupid.

And I'm going to get that list of 19 states and read it out on the air. So hopefully we can embarrass the people in those states that allow this to become long. Well, as a matter of fact, one of them that charges almost $200 is California. How hypocritical is that? I think Illinois was talking about doing a $1,000 annual fee

just because they're not going to be able to collect the gas tax you would be paying. I think they're considering it right now. $1,000. They are politicians. there is you know I can never be surprised or shocked at the stupidity of our politicians but I was a little bit surprised when I heard that yeah never ceased to amaze us do we have any more texts so Rick we're running short on time I've got that list of states right here well if you'd like to hear more if we have time after the mystery

shopping report we'll read that list out okay that sounds real good and ladies gentlemen let me remind you that you too can vote on the mystery shopping report And that text number is 772-4976530. Now back to the recovering car dealer and the mystery shopping report from Greco. That's Greco Chevrolet in Delray Beach. Okay. Greco is not on any of our recommended buying list.

We're taking a break from our normal CarMax efforts. We've been shopping CarMax quite a bit to find out if they will sell cars with dangerous recalls, and they will. In fact, I just spoke to an attorney, Justin Lynn, on the air a few minutes ago, and I think he's going to take a look at CarMax for a class action suit. In recent years, while still prevalent, the most extreme examples of bait-and-switch style advertising are less common than they used to be. Perhaps this is due to various manufacturers like Honda and Toyota putting into place stricter rules on how their cars can be advertised. This happened four or five years ago. I'm not sure how good a thing it is, but I believe it has somewhat of a positive effect,

or perhaps this is due to a more informed public, and we at Earl and Carr's, Earl Sturton Cars, are proud to take some credit for that in South Florida. But you're in for a treat or a surprise here. It's not really a treat when we find somebody that just didn't get the message. This week's mystery shop brings us to a familiar dealer group. We've shopped them several times over the years, and you may know them from their multiple positions on our bad dealer list. Good dealer, baddielderlist.com. www.

www. www. www. And you can go online and check Earl Stewart on Cars Recommended and do not buy from this dealer list. And you'll find Napleton, for example, and Greco are two of the dealers that just don't have any dealerships, and they have multiple dealerships. but none of them are on the recommend dealer list. So we're going to do a Greco Chevrolet in Delery Beach, and this is his shopping report.

On the new car specials page of their website, we found several offers that appear too good to be true. Curiously, the tagline for this ad is Greco Summer Switch, and that had to make all of us here laugh at Erlon Cars because of what, you know, bait and switch? I mean, is that subliminal? Was that subconscious when the advertiser wrote this ad and I'm looking at it right here?

Greco Summer Switch, I'll hold it up to the camera for you streaming us on Facebook or YouTube. Greco Summer Switch. We chose a particularly enticing offer to investigate a new 2019 Camaro starting at 17,699 or lease it for $2509. dollars per month. These lease ads amaze me. There's $99 per month. They're advertising. I see them

locally, and you probably see them in your market. Ninety-nine seems to be a magic monthly payment. And of course, there's no truth to it. There's always something hidden in the fine print. You know what they say about offers that seem to be too good to be true? Yeah. Well, we called on mystery shopper extraordinary agent thunder to investigate here's a reporter speak of the first person as if I were agent thunder I arrived at the dealership around noon as a bit run down gave off a real old school vibe I was immediately greeted by a young man named David sales manager quickly came over and explained that David was new but he was we were in good hands and

David would take good care of us David offered us a bottle of water sat me down a desk that was uncomfortably close to several managers, sales managers and other salesmen were hovering by. Now, you notice we're naming names and this is one of the things that we do that is kind of special.

Our mystery shopping report is unique. You won't find it anywhere where a car dealer like myself, I prefer to think of myself as a consumer advocate, but this radio show we name the dealership, we name the salespeople, we name the managers,

And we tell you exactly what happened. And we've been doing this for 15 years. We've been shopping different car dealers in Florida for 15 years. And we've never been sued. We just talked to an attorney. I'm Justin Lynn. And if he's still listening, he'll probably say that is amazing. We actually have named dealerships and salespeople and managers.

Accused them of anything that we found them doing, including breaking the law, lying, cheating, and all the other things that are not so happy to do to a customer. And we talk about it openly, and we've never been sued. And I love to brag about this. Why? Because the perfect defense against libel and slander is the truth. We are speaking the truth.

So here we are. Greco Del Rey, Greco Chevrolete Del Rey, call your lawyer, tell them to tune in. and if we say something that is untrue, I want you to sue me, but we haven't been sued in 15 years. And this is the truth as we saw it, and I think you'll agree if you're listening. I told David that the new car specials on the website caught my attention. Specifically, the offer to purchase a new 2019 Camero for $17,699

or lease it for $2.59. $259 a month. That's a heck of a deal. He wasn't aware of what I was talking about, the salesman. He was new, David. He came back, he went out to check. He came back to inform me that the offer was on a lower end, model Camaro. He then asked me what price I'd like to be around. I gave him a dumbfounded look. I said, I saw the price on the website, and that's the price that I want to be around. I came in on the advertised price. He then proceeded to ask, me a series of questions that this manager must have prepped him with. Here's the first one.

Was I active in the military? Isn't that strange? I come into buy a car on an advertisement, and they want to know if I'm a soldier or a sailor. So, and they also want to know, did I have a current lease with General Motors, peculiar? Why so interested in those things? I responded, no, I don't have a lease, and I'm not in the military. I'm just looking to purchase this car for the advertised price. He then asked me which color I would like and went out to find the car so we can take a look.

A few minutes later, he pulls up with a base, basic stripped base is what we call it in the trade. Four-cylinder Camaro, no options or accessories. We walked around the car, took a test drive. He wasn't familiar with the car. David was new, so he read the vehicle information. from the window sticker. It was a pretty quick test drive, and we returned to the lot.

Back at the desk, he asked me if I'm interested in the car. I said, yeah, I'd like to see the numbers on a purchase order, a buyer's order. He excused himself to speak with the manager, again, 20 minutes. So he's a new salesman, leaving me for 20 minutes to twidle my thumbs.

He comes back with the manager, Todd. Okay, now we're naming. names, Greco Chevrolet Del Rey, David the salesman, now we have Todd, the sales manager. And Todd repeated that David is new and wanted to let me know that the special advertised price is based on specific questions, qualifications, I'd say, such as being active duty military. Now, one of the chances are that anybody walking into a car dealership around here is on active duty.

I mean, we're not at war that I'm aware of, and we have a few little. police actions going they used to go on. But the odds against someone walking into a car dealership on an advertised price that are on active duty in South Florida. Rick, what would you say? One out of a thousand? I think you

might be a little might be a little more on that, but maybe one out of 5,000. I mean, if this were Pensacola or Jacksonville where there was a big military base right nearby, I could see it possible. No military bases down here. Nah. Okay, so that's premeditated.

right there. And they also asked me if I had a current GM lease. Now GM has got something like, what, 8% of the market and they lease maybe a fourth of that. So let's say 2 or 3%. So the odds are about 2 or 3 out of 100, if that, if they have a GM lease. So to combine the two active duty of military with a GM lease, that's virtually impossible. And they know that, right? So this is bait and switch. The advertised model was actually an even lower Camaro than the one I was looking at. However, he went on to say how he was going to try to get me

as close to what I saw advertised. How much money are you able to put down? Now, putting down money is paying. So when you put down money, you're not lower in the price. You're paying more. So that's what he asked me. So I was a little tired. I said I might be able to come up with $10,000

to get things rolling here. He says, okay, and then he'd be right back. There he goes again. David's going back to talk to Todd. He comes back with a lease information sheet despite my repeated request for purchase numbers. He told me, don't worry, that it says lease information.

He'd give me a buyer's order later. He explained that he couldn't get all the rebates needed to discount this. 27,990 MSRP, card down the advertised price of 17,999, but came close. He's got it down to 21,000, he says, with all fees and taxes. I still don't believe that. I asked him if there was a dealer fee, and he said, yes, of course, that it's worked into the numbers. He said he'd have it on the purchase order when I came back.

So we're trying to buy it, and all he wants to do is give me leasing information. He says his dealer fee is $999. Back to the lease sheet, explained that with my $10,000 down, I'd be at $300 per month and went on to explain the numbers. I was very confused by the end of the conversation and wanted to get out of there. The sales manager gave me a ton of information quickly, and an argument was going on between another customer

and a manager right next to us with many people looking on, and I kept being told I'd be paying $300 a month. My repeated requests for a simple purchase order were ignored. I was genuinely feeling very, very upset. And I realized that I was not going to get the car at the price that I came in on. Here's the analysis. The least information sheet given to Agent Thunder shows an initial cap cost of $27,000. Cap cost is dealer lingo, lease lingo, for what the price of the car would be if you bought it.

This is only a $990 discount of the SMRP, and then shows, but does not itemize $2,109 in adds to the price or cap cost. This is most likely the leasing company's acquisition fee. That's another hidden fee, dealer fee, and Grico's hidden fees for $999. This adds up to a price of over 29,000, and that's north higher than the 21,000, told the Agent Thunder by the manager. So it was a lie, it was a deception, it was a bait and switch, and it's clear that this is the worst mission that Agent Thunder has ever been on. I got to say this is most even greater than Napleton who was on our list of the most decepty dealers

Greco is Trump Napleton now in deception we've got a vote on this now and actually there's no vote in my mind let's go to the text first have we any text votes come in Rick so far we've got

Linda has says F that's just too weird Mr. Hand says F failure and hang them high. I normally don't go first, but I just can't wait to say this is the biggest failure that we've made in a long, long time. Grico is the big fact, F minus. Nancy, what do you say? I also give them an F.

This really represents a terrible reflection on car dealers. and it's really very sad. There's a whole lot of that going on. Refer to Earl's bait-and-switch column that he wrote at Earl on Cars. Okay, Alan, you're up. We'll give the salesman a benefit of the doubt and give him a D because he's new, if that's true. That's fair. I mean, it's merciful, yes.

And F for the dealer and going over this buyer's order that's not a buyer's order, it's a lease, whatever, proposal. And I'm pretty good at math. I still don't know where all his $10,000 went, but NF. Yeah. It was playing with the down payment. He was treating, believe it or not, a $10,000 payment as a price reduction, and that's not. And he was also talking about adding the dealer fees on top of the cap cost to booth the price up and the lease acquisition fee, and who knows what else. Rick? I've got Mark and Kit Kat both saying F. Donovan. and LJ both saying F, Ernesto saying F, Doug and Ollie both say F,

Olly says, Meow F, and my own F. I just wonder, how do we always get the new salespeople? When are we going to have one of our guys go in there and get a salesperson that's been doing it for six, seven years at that dealership? I think turnover among car salespeople is the highest of any profession. And it's a tribute to the fact that most of the young, people that come in and they want to start selling cars because they think they can make a lot of money will not put up with the shenanigans with the dealer. Can you imagine going into a car

dealership? You haven't sold cars before and you don't anticipate what you have to go through and the sales meeting that gets you in there and he said, now we're advertising this car at $10,000 list and we can sell it for. So people are going to be coming in on this ad and then you have to explain to them why they can't buy the car. Come and get me, I'll help you, and that's a sales manager. How long could you survive in that sort of environment, knowing that everybody that came to the door that spoke to you and wanted to buy the car, you'd have to lie to to get them to buy a car

which was higher price, higher profit for the dealer? So a lot of these young salespeople don't last more than a few weeks, and after that their brain damage is so much, they leave. It's very rare to find a veteran salesperson. If you find a veteran salesperson, either he has a group following that he will treat fairly, and they go in and deal with a salesperson because he is honest, despite the dealer's behavior, or else he is a crook just like the dealer, and he doesn't mind lying to you. So it's a sad state of affairs. I think we're just about out of time, aren't we, Nancy? Yes, we are. And we want to thank everyone who may

show happened this morning in our brand new studio from all of us here at Earl on cars. We want to thank you again. Have a wonderful weekend. Don't know. And don't know.