The Autobarn Subaru of Countryside

The "Subaru Love Promise" was not kept in my experience I’m glad that many Autobarn Subaru of Countryside customers have had positive experiences with the dealership, but based on my used car shopping exper I’m glad that many Autobarn Subaru of Countryside customers have had positive experiences with the dealership, but based on my used car shopping experience with them I would not buy or service a new or used car there. My experience at Autobarn Subaru started out on a very positive note. My wife and I went to the dealership to test drive a 2012 Honda Pilot. Our salesperson was Dave Percudani, and he took great care of us. He was a very informative, engaging but no-pressure salesman, and we liked that. Dave treated us with great care and respect and if I were writing this review based on my experience with Dave alone it would be a 5 out of 5. As it stands my review is a 2 out of 5 rather than 1 out of 5 solely because of Dave. If I were writing my review based only on my experience with sales manager Tim Turkalov (more on that below), it would be a 1 out of 5 because zero out of 5 is not an option. A week and a half after test-driving the Pilot we decided we wanted to make an offer on it and I returned a week ago Monday morning to check in with Dave. Dave remembered me and was as pleasant and helpful as ever. We looked at the car again and then returned to his office where I made an offer that he said he thought would be acceptable. I explained that I had a class to teach 95 miles away in Indiana at 1pm that day and so had to leave in 5 minutes (I was already running late and would have to miss lunch) and couldn’t stay and complete all the paperwork. I told them I would be back in Countryside the following evening, about 32 hours later. Dave asked if I would be willing to leave a $500 deposit to hold the car and have them stop showing it. That seemed reasonble and I agreed to leaving the deposit and went to my car to get my checkbook. When I returned to Dave’s office, I was met by Dave and sales manager, Tim Turkalov. With Tim entering the picture things went quickly downhill. The high level of trust and comfort that I experienced with Dave fell to the gutter. First, Tim went into the cliché sales spiel about how much interest they’d gotten in that Pilot earlier that day. I of course have no way of knowing whether that was true. What I do know with certainty, however, was that we test drove the car a week and a half earlier and they still hadn’t sold it. So on the one hand a warning light went on in my head as Tim did his high-pressure routine. I found it hard to trust what he was saying. On the other hand, even if they had been getting a lot of interest in the car I had just made an offer they found acceptable so it was puzzling why Tim’s high pressure to get me to buy routine was necessary at all. Second, Tim explained that they couldn’t take a deposit and hold the car for a day. I explained I wasn’t asking them to do it out of the goodness of their hearts. I was giving them $500, which was theirs if I didn’t return to complete the purchase in 32 hours. My level of trust with Tim dropped further when he said he couldn’t take a deposit. That was puzzling to me first of all because the idea of leaving a deposit came from one of their salesman, not from me. I also knew that leaving deposits at dealerships to hold cars is a fairly common practice (more on that below). I explained that there was an important difference between “we can’t do that,” and “we’re choosing not to do that (though we could).” I also explained that a dealership that truly cared about customers would choose to make that reasonable accommodation. Tim was choosing not to make the reasonable accommodation, and that was hard to understand given what I’d heard about the dealership’s professed concern for customer care. It was also hard to square with the Subaru Love Promise prominently displayed on Autobarn Subaru’s website: “This is our commitment to show love and respect to our customers and to work to make a positive impact in the world.” I felt respected and loved by Dave, but not even respected, let alone loved, by Tim. And it puzzled and disappointed me that a dealership that professed a concern for treating customers right would put a person who operates like Tim in a supervisory position of authority. I had been excited to leave a deposit and then come back the next day to buy the car. Tim was insisting that I complete all the paperwork then, though I’d explained that doing so would make me late for a university class I had to teach at 1pm that day, a two-hour drive away and I would lose an hour because it was in the Eastern time zone. I wasn’t going to leave a classroom of students wondering where I was. So I stood up and told Dave and then Tim that I wasn’t going to buy the car because I don’t make major purchase decisions under deliberate and unnecessary pressure and my trust and enthusiasm for working with Autobarn Subaru had evaporated quickly after Tim became involved in the sales process. I felt badly for Dave, because he had done his job very well and earned a sale and his sales manager blew that for him. In my opinion, Tim owes Dave that commission. But I wasn’t going to cave to pressure. I told Dave that at some point I’d like to speak to the owner of the dealership about my experience, and understood from things I’d heard and read that the owner was a woman. While driving to Indiana I got a call from a guy, whose name was not clear, who said he heard that I wanted to speak to an owner and could speak to him. I told him about the experience and about not liking high-pressure tactics and he agreed. But then, in a logically inconsistent fashion, he also said that there had been a lot of interest in the Pilot and that therefore basically Tim had done nothing wrong in pressuring me. That made little sense. Even if there had been a lot of interest in the car, I had already made an offer that neither Tim nor the guy who called later said was not high enough. So why was Tim’s “lots of interest” routine needed in the first place when they had a willing buyer making an acceptable offer? I left the dealership in frustration and disappointment. Dave and Tim had a willing happy and trusting buyer in Dave’s office with a checkbook and a preapproved car loan and Tim handled the situation in such a way that the buyer walked out the door never to return. The following day I looked at another Pilot at McGrath Acura in Westmont, and a Subaru Outback at Grand Subaru in Bensenville. Both of those dealerships said they’d be glad to take a $500 deposit to hold a car, and both offered to do it over the phone and expressed surprise that Autobarn Subaru would not take a deposit. Why Autobarn Subaru is not willing to be as accommodating as other dealerships, I don’t know. But it is hard to square with saying that you care greatly for customers and it made my decision as to which dealership to give my business easy. As someone who teaches courses in both ethics and negotiations to graduate business students I find Autobarn Subaru’s treatment of me disappointing both as a matter of ethics and as a matter of negotiations. In terms of ethics, it’s a good rule to treat others the way you’d like to be treated. I am sure that Tim would not want to be pressured into a sale himself, or want any of his loved ones to be pressured. But he pressured me needlessly and fruitlessly. In terms of negotiations, I had gotten to an enthusiastic “yes” on the terms of the deal with Dave, but then Tim handled things in such a way that my “yes” became a “xxxx no.” That didn’t make sense even if he didn’t care about customers but only cared about the bottom line. The way I was treated hurt Autobarn Subaru’s bottom line in two ways. For one thing, Tim blew a sale that they had in hand. For another thing, I ended up buying a Subaru Outback from Grand Subaru the next day and plan to keep it for years. But even though Autobarn Subaru is the Subaru dealership closest to me, I won’t be going there for repairs. Based on my experience I can enthusiastically recommend going to McGrath Acura and working with John Unger and Amy Brosnan, or going to Grand Subaru in Bensenville and working with Joe Lewicki. I hope you all have a better car buying experience than I had at Autobarn Subaru. More