Automobiles

Mine and the credit union’s, that is… We shall see.

I took it upon myself to try to purchase a 2014 Venza through a large local Toyota dealership. Because I was stressing over the increasing unreliability of my 16-year-old Sienna, I just wanted to get this over with. Mistake number 1: Don’t ever get in a hurry to buy a car.

The proposed new car had the lowest mileage of any comparable vehicle I could find within 150 miles of the Funny Farm: 37,350±. The price was just barely under the limit of what I could pay. Sort of. And it appeared to be in good condition. Probably.

I arranged pre-approved financing through my credit union, and presented documentation in the form of a letter of approval shipped directly from the credit union to the dealership.

The dealership’s hustler…uhm, “financial manager”…pressured me fiercely to accept the dealership’s 2.9% financing instead of the 1.9% loan for which I had been approved. I resisted. After “negotiating” (puhleeeze!) most of the day away, they gave me a bill of sale and the keys to the car, and I drove away, thinking I had an expensive used car to park in my garage.

A day and a half later, the “financial manager” called and said the loan had not gone through because they couldn’t get past the credit freeze to pull a credit report from Experian: a flat lie, because they told me they had downloaded my credit report while I was at the dealership, and proving it by revealing they knew my credit score, which is a shade on the amazing side because of my habit of charging everything on AMEX and paying it off at the end of the month. Nor, of course, would they have let me drive the vehicle off the lot without approving a credit report… That notwithstanding: I must hurry back in, he said, to make this right.

This is what is known as a “spot delivery” scam: They pretend to approve you on the spot and let you drive the car off — at which point they take possession of your car — and then they call you back in for more extreme harassment than the hustle you’ve already been through. If you say the deal is off and you want your car back, they tell you they’ve already sold it.

Rather than arguing with the sleazy guy, I called the loan officer I was dealing with. Long story short, he contacted the dealership and arranged for them to accept a check from the credit union for payment in full of the car. I do not know what he said to them, but figure it must have entailed some sort of implicit or explicit threat, because they did NOT want to finance the car at the pre-approved 1.9% rate, and so you may be sure they didn’t want to take a cash payment. Loan officer called late Friday night with instructions to pick up the check at the CU when they opened and deliver it to the bastards.

Over the weekend, I talked my son into coming with me, at considerable inconvenience to him. He has a very heavy workload and did not feel he could take time off today, but seeing the stress the whole fiasco was causing, he agreed to do so.

Also while passing Saturday and Sunday, I downloaded an auto report from Experian’s AutoCheck, which is similar to Carfax. It indeed did show the vehicle had never been in an accident (not a reported one, anyway), and it confirmed the mileage and miscellaneous other details. It also showed that the saleswoman’s claim that it belonged to one ever-so-caring couple was a lie: it had been a fleet/rental/lease car in Las Vegas and was purchased (presumably by Toyota) on September 5 at auction.

Chuck the WonderMechanic had asked me to bring the car up to his shop for a quick inspection when they opened this morning, which was the soonest he could get his lifts free. When I arrived at 8 a.m., they were open and ready to go. Mechanic Harold inspected as much as one could without taking anything apart. He said the vehicle looked to be in good to excellent condition, except for the front brake pads, which he estimated had 6,000 to 8,000 miles left on them. The rear brake pads had been replaced, he said. Everything else that he could easily see appeared to be OK.

From there I flew to the credit union, where I picked up a check for $22,164.83. The manager there, James, had just bought a car at the same dealership a couple of weeks ago and agreed they were difficult to deal with. He also had arranged to pay for his car with a cash advance from the credit union.

Met my son at his office, and we drove to the dealership in his car, lest the bastards try to repossess the Venza.

We delivered the check at about 10:50 a.m.

The “financial manager” did not even remember me! He grabbed the check and tried to make off with it. I said I wanted a receipt. He said he couldn’t give me a receipt: the check clearing the bank would be the receipt.

My son insisted that we be given a receipt acknowledging that we turned the check over to Bell Rd. The guy offered a photocopy. My son said that would be OK if the guy signed it.

He did NOT want to sign it; he would only initial it. My son seemed to think that suffices; I do not, because the scribble he put on it is pretty generic. No one could figure out what it means or who scribbled it.

So it still remains to be seen whether this is going to go through or not.

My son advised me not to contest the $1300 worth of extraneous expenses “financial manager” had tacked on. This is another scam, known as “packed payments“: piling on a shitload of costs so as to drive up the monthly payments. Among the rip-offs were paint sealer I did not ask for or approve and an alarm system that was already on the vehicle, not an add-on ordered by me.

As it develops, the $429 worth of “document fees” may be illegal. Maybe I’ll bring that to the attention of the state attorney general’s office. But maybe not. I’m so royally sick of this, I surely do not feel like ever hearing anything about it again.

So… I have the car, and supposedly the deal is done — though that remains to be seen. Practitioners of the spot delivery scam have been known to badger their marks weeks or even months after the car was transferred. But since it now belongs to the credit union, I doubt if they’ll try any more antics.

Several errors were made on my part:

 1. Let myself get enthused about having that car, rather than being willing to wait, possibly for weeks or months, for some other choice to come up.
 2. Dealt with the sharks one-on-many, rather than bringing someone with me to “negotiate.”
 3. Failed to look up the car on Experian or Carfax myself.
 4. Didn’t read the sales agreement word for word for word for word (because I had a migraine headache and could barely focus on the conversation, much less on a complex fine-print document).
 5. Tried to power through the migraine.
 6. Failed to challenge obvious rip-offs.
 7. Did not know I could ask the CU to advance the full purchase price rather than fiddling with a subcontracted loan deal.

Really…you have to wonder why tactics like the ones that were deployed on me are legal at all.

If I ever have to buy a car again — and I sincerely hope I die before that day comes — I’m bringing a lawyer and a police officer with me.

 

 

 

So… The car flap subsided over the weekend but will start again first thing tomorrow morning.

I have to show up at the credit union at 9 a.m. to pick up a check, which supposedly I will present to the crooks at the car dealership, thereby ending the whole circus. My son has said he will come with me, which is much desired and appreciated given the way these people have taken advantage of me. But that will require me to drive all the way to the CU, then turn around and drive all the way back to his office a few blocks from my house, then drive way to hell and gone up the freeway to North Phoenix.

What a mistake it was to figure it would be OK to do business with SDXB’s ex-girlfriend, from whom we bought a car for my son when he was in high school. She’s lied to me, the so-called “financial manager” has lied to me, and now I’ve learned that what they’re doing is such a commonplace scam it has a name in the industry: the Spot Delivery scam. The goal is to drag you back in, rewrite the loan agreement, and add a ton of other expenses.

Where these people are concerned, they’re unhappy because I arranged my own financing at 1.9%, which they don’t want to accept. They’re trying to maneuver me into their own 2.9% loan, which I am not going to accept.

Typical in the Spot Delivery maneuver, when you show up there and announce you’re not going to do it, they tell you the car they took from you is sold or otherwise disappeared, so you’re pretty much screwed.

They also engaged in “payment packing,” in which the dealer adds as many expensive extras as possible.

The “financial manager” hustler hammered away at me for almost an hour trying to persuade me to buy an extended warranty above and beyond the 7-year, 100,000-mile CPO warranty. I refused. But they did  add to the bill of sale a “theft code” (which I thought was part of the purchase price: $289.90) and a “paint protection” finish (which I thought came with the car’s original new-car package: $195). They also charged a “document preparation fee” of $429 and $395 for an alarm, which according to the owner’s manual is part of the car’s standard equipment.

That comes to $1308.90 extra for items that I wasn’t even aware I was consenting to and at least of two of which were already on the car at the time they put it up for sale. There’s no way they could have applied a paint sealant while I was at the dealership: there wasn’t time for that, despite their keeping me waiting for hours. Nor is there any way they could have installed an alarm system while I was waiting. The saleswoman   told me she was having the car “detailed,” not that she was having it painted and adding equipment.

The credit union’s loan officer procured an agreement from the “financial manager” jerk that they would accept a check from the CU. But it remains to be seen whether they’ll do it. And it remains to be seen how much of our time they’ll soak up in this. My son has an overload of work and says he really can’t afford to take time off his job. But I really don’t have anyone else to help do battle with these people, and since I’m already losing, big time, I don’t feel I can take them on alone.

As soon as this is over, I’m filing a complaint with the state attorney general’s office. But meanwhile, the question is how to get it over.

The car itself is pretty cool. I’ve been reading the owner’s manual like a textbook. It does some pretty amazing things and has some very nifty features. One is, admittedly, left wondering “why?” Who really needs all this stuff? To my mind, electronic tools to accomplish things you can do with a flick of a finger look like more and more stuff to break.

It’s sad, how Toyota changed with success in this country. When they were first trying to get a foothold here — about the time I got my first Toyota, a Corona, and everyone was sick of Unsafe at Any Speed cars and dealers for whom rip-offs were SOP — Toyota’s sales and service were primo. They left American car dealerships in the dirt. But now that they own the market, they behave exactly like US car dealers used to in the 1970s and 80s: dirty.

 

A 16-year-old car is a slice of history; excavating its contents is like going on an archaeological dig. Here’s what I came across when I went to shovel out the Dog Chariot before forking it over as a trade-in.

• A disintegrating Ziplock bag filled with quarters, for use in pay phones
• A dime dated 1971
• A fistful of city and state road maps. MAPS! Remember those?
• One nonfunctional flashlight, sealed shut by battery corrosion
• Two tire gauges, never used; one dates to the Early Devonian
• One wing corkscrew for emergency wine bottles
• Two pair of nonRx shades
• Several emery boards
• Half a roll of Rolaids, age unknown
• One forgotten comb
• One rarely used hairbrush
• One fold-up umbrella

The new car has TWO big storage compartments between the front seats. These will more than accommodate the junk I carry. The van, alas, had nothing to speak of in that line, and so I had two flat cardboard boxes and a basket in which I carried around things like shades, antacids, a notepad and pen, packet of glasses cleaner, junk, junk,  junk, and more  junk.

It’s going to be so tidy inside that car, it’ll look like…like it belongs to someone else! 😀

Have you ever excavated a car? What did you find in it?

 

It’s HERE! The new vehicle has taken up residence in the garage.

Having decided the time had come to replace the beloved Dog Chariot., I went over to Bell Road Toyota, a large dealership where a friend of a friend is fleet manager. There I spent the entire afternoon wrestling with Toyota staff and ninnies at the credit union’s lender and on and on. It was amazingly awful. The piles of incomprehensible papers they make you sign rival the stacks of contracts you have to sign to get a mortgage.

So which is worse? Getting a mortgage or buying a car?

My own money is on the car transaction. Mortgage officers don’t try to pressure you to buy things you don’t need or want.

The car is a so-called “Certified Pre-Owned” (CPO) number, which means the dealer has refurbished it from front to back and provides an extended, fairly comprehensive warranty: 100,000 miles or seven years. They’re very proud of this and happily tell you all about it, over and over…until you get to the financial guy to whom you’re supposed to pay up.

He spent the better part of an hour trying to persuade me that I had to buy additional warranty coverage, lest God Only Knows WHAT might happen — liberally emphasizing the cost of replacing a fuel filter installed inside a gas tank. Much of this threat was laid to the federal government’s unreasonable demands for lowered emissions.

Ultimately I passed on the expensive extra warranty: it looked like a scam, sort of like those extended warranties peddled by appliance stores and Best Buy and the like. He finally gave up.

It really is a nice car.

So the bad news is, the car’s alternator crapped out in Tolleson, an alarming little burg where the term “low rent” means “gentrified.” The good news is, I just replaced the alternator in June, so it’s still on the warranty. The bad news redux is that you can’t buy a new alternator in the aftermarket. All aftermarket alternators, even if you buy one from a car dealership, are rebuilt. And, Chuck remarked as he was chauffeuring me home from his shop, “they crap out.”

Yeah. Well. Dude! It woulda been nice if you’d clued me to that before you charged me for a piece of junk that lasted all of four months and stranded me for five interminable hours in a QT parking lot inhabited by drug addicts!

Not wanting to repeat that adventure, I’m now actively in the car market. After much study of Edmunds, Car & Driver, Carfax, and Car Guru, the choices are narrowed down to a Toyota Venza or a Honda Santa Fe, 2012 – 2015.

The Venza is a kewl little crossover, unfortunately discontinued in 2015. My friend KJG and her DH own one, and they love it. I test-drove the Venza the last time I fell into a car-driving frenzy and really liked it, too. With a V-6, it’s quite the little rocket, and it has plenty of room for dogs, estate sale finds, and friends.

The Santa Fe is a larger vehicle but it has much to recommend it.  The regular Santa Fe is a full-sized SUV, but there’s a “Sport” model that’s shorter, with only five seats. Edmunds calls the Santa Fe the “true winner” in its class. You can’t get a six-banger in the Sport, but you can get a turbo-charged four-banger, which is almost as good.

Also much admired by Edmunds — and given a higher “grade” — is the Honda Odyssey. But I have the same problem with it now that I did when I got the Sienna: it seems like WAY too much truck than I need.

WhatEVER. We’ll see what the broker comes up with. He said he knew someone who was trying to unload a Santa Fe, and he thinks there’ll be a selection of Venzas. I didn’t find the latter to be true on Car Guru or Edmunds — to the contrary, availability of the Venza is limited. It was discontinued in 2015, so I expect a lot of owners don’t want to part with theirs. Or something.

I’m prequalified for $22,000 at 1.9% through the credit union. It will cover certified “pre-owned” cars between 2012 and 2015. Looks like a Santa Fe dated 2013 or 2014 is likely to run $17,000 to $18,000. I think the Sienna is worth about $1200 on trade-in (can no longer see Kelly Blue Book, because they now demand that you disable your AdBlocker, which I ain’t a-gonna do). If I don’t resurface the pool this year, I should be able to disgorge about $4,000 as a cash down payment. Let’s say I can get the loan amount down to 15 grand (holy sh!t): over five years, that’s $262.26 a month.

That would be precisely $262 more than I can afford.

So…needless to say, I am not pleased at the prospect of being chained to an auto loan for the next five years. However, the credit union will let you pay down principal, so once again — as happened the last time I had to get a car loan — I’ll throw every windfall large and small at the thing, and it will probably go away in a lot less than five years.

When I bought a Camry on time — back when I had a job…remember those? — that strategy paid off a five-year loan in 18 months.

We just deposited the current Required Minimum Withdrawal from Fidelity into my checking account. I believe I’m about $5,000 the good this year. So I could probably come up with as much as 5 grand in cash — though I’d rather not.  There’s a certified pre-owned Santa Fe with 30,300 miles on it on sale right now for $17,400. If my car is worth around a thousand bucks and I paid down $5,000 in cash, then I’d only have to finance about $11,400 (plus, plus, plus…). That’d be $200 a month.

Marginally affordable.

Car Guru shows only three 2012-2015 Toyota Venzas for sale in the Phoenix area. Two of them are graded as not good buys; the one they think is a pretty good deal is $18,598, for a 2013 vehicle with a V-6 engine and 46,364 miles on it. Holy mackerel.

LOL! Here’s a Santa Fe that looks like it’s orange! I’d have to paint yellow and black flames on the sides….

Ugh. I’ve never bought a used car before. This doesn’t look like a very safe prospect. But I sure can’t afford new-car prices.

Damn George Bush and his handlers for wrecking the economy and putting me (and everyone else) out of a job! I’d have  bought a new car six years ago if it weren’t for those shenanigans…and would easily be able to afford another new car right about now. That’s “new” new, not “new to me.”