Automobiles

Driving in Phoenix: what a joy! Come quarter to seven this morning, I started out for my meeting in Scottsdale. Because the two main north-south thoroughfares through the central part of the city have reverse lanes and a nasty rule saying you can’t turn left (i.e., toward Scottsdale…) during the rush hours, I usually make my way through not one, not two, not three, but FOUR neighborhoods to get to Central Avenue, then turn east on Glendale for the long slow trudge to the West’s Most Western Tourist Trap Town.

Lately, though, Glendale has been backed up about two miles west of the SR 51 onramps. Traffic comes to a stop and about three cars get through each green light (if that many).

So I had the idea that I would cross Northern to 16th Street, which is relatively less traveled, and connect with Glendale east of the first mile of backup. Actually, if I wanted to veer out of my way, I could take Northern to the 51 and then drop off at Glendale, which would put me on the far side of the whole mess.

I get on to Northern, and the first thing I see is the usual goddamn construction. Northern has been torn up not for weeks but for months in the aftermath of the light-rail boondoggle. This morning they’ve got a lane closed and signs up reading “no lane markings.” Right.

Traffic is just flat stopped. I manage to cut across to the outside lane and then swerve into the neighborhood south of Northern. From there I know how to make my way to Central Avenue, whence (once again, goddamn it!) I’ll follow the time-dishonored route to Glendale and then east to the Home of the Rich and the Arrogant.

But no.

Now Central comes to a halt. They’ve got the whole road shut down for a wreck. I try to dodge into a west-bound side street, since I do know how to navigate those and figure I can at least get back to 7th Ave and thence north to the stymied Northern Avenue.

Wrong! It’s a dead end.

I muscle my way back into the stalled traffic on Central. The cops are…get this!!…routing traffic into a residential cul-de-sac!

Hundreds of cars — surely by the end of the morning upwards of a thousand — are filing past a dozen fancy, secluded private homes, circling around the end of their street, and filing back out toward Central, where they have no choice but to turn north.

What. A. Mess.

The barricade is close enough to the wreck to afford a great view of the carnage. The car they’re trying to hoist onto a tow truck’s flatbed looks like a piece of sheet metal. Literally: bone flat.

The Camry that plowed into the 18-wheeler looked exactly like someone had taken a gigantic rolling pin and rolled it out flat like a piece of dough.

It’s hard to believe anybody could have gotten out of that alive.

M’hijito, who’s an insurance adjuster, says cars are so much safer than they were in days of yore that many more people survive wrecks. Those who do survive are a lot more messed up, but they do live. After a fashion.

And I do have to say: if that had been the last American car I owned — a 1967 Ford Fairlane, one of the most notable lemons ever to grace America’s highways — nobody would have been pulled out of it alive. That thing had no airbags, of course. No shoulder belts. Ford had installed some cheesy lap-belts, but only because the government forced them to it. No collapsible steering wheel, no impact-engineered frame, no head rests, no padded dashboards, no antilock brakes, no ABS, no nothin’.

One of the main reasons the ex and I started buying European and then Japanese cars was that Mercedes and Volvo had real seat belts. You know: the kind with a shoulder belt, too? Ford resisted installing safety equipment with all its vast corporate might. They claimed shoulder belts were impossible to install and that consumers wouldn’t wear them. When they were finally pressed to it, they put in shoulder belts that had to be clipped separately from the lap belts.

Americans weren’t that dumb. When affordable Japanese cars hit these shores, the sheep flocked to them. Must have been quite a surprise to Detroit’s moguls.

To my mind, it’s questionable whether you’d want to survive a wreck in which an 18-wheeler smushed your car into a pancake and dragged it 50 feet. However, back in the good old days, it didn’t take a catastrophic crash to kill you. A fender-bender could do the job, especially if you were in one of the models with exploding gas tanks.

So. Yeah. I could sure do without all the electronic frou-frou this new car has. But I can’t imagine going back to what we had before about 1980.

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.