I had a very bad experience trying to buy a new car with - yupasama
I had a very bad experience trying to buy a new car with Route 1 Hyundai. It felt like they were trying to trick me at every step of the way.
The first red flag was when I went in for a test drive. My assigned sales representative—I’ll call him X—was very busy, which is fine, but I was with my 5 year old, and we had limited time before he had to go home for dinner. Still, even though we waited over 45 minutes to get into the car, he insisted I wait after the test drive was over to talk to a manager. I had told him then that my kid was already late for his dinner and bed time, but X didn’t care. He just wanted to make a sale. I walked out and told the person who chased after me to do everything by text and email.
The next red flags were during haggling on price. I pushed back on the $895 doc fee, which is the highest I’ve seen from any NJ Hyundai dealership. I said for such a high doc fee I would like some free all weather mats. X said fine, but what he did was add the price of those mats to the total, so I had to email him again to say that what I wanted was *free* mats.
Similarly, I said I didn’t want the dealer-added security system. X said he can remove the VIN etching, but he left the price in the quote, so again, I had to email a second time to say that what I meant (obviously?) was that I don’t want to *pay* for a dealer-added security system.
Then there’s the fact that there was a big “non-tax fee” that was not broken down any further. Basically that line was just a slush fund.
The next red flag was when the financing team refused to send me their terms sheet by email. Instead, they insisted on talking over the phone. Even then, the monthly fee they quoted me eighty cents per month too high.
X called me to insist that what he had called the “out the door” price earlier was really just an estimate, and I replied that that’s not what ‘out the door price’ means. He said he could still do the deal for the original out the door price, on two conditions. One, I had to leave him a stellar review, and two, we had to do the deal that day, at my house. I flat out refused on the first condition but was fine with the second one.
I still wanted all the documents sent to my email before doing the deal, but X just ignored that and left the dealership without sending anything. Another red flag.
When he arrived at my door, the monthly price his finance team quoted me was *still* the inflated one that was eighty cents per month over what it should have been. I started to get visibly annoyed, so X told them to email the terms to me, as I had insisted all along.
I never received that email.
Then we noticed the promised floor mats were missing. X said they weren’t in stock at the moment, but should arrive in a few days, at which time they would deliver them to me.
That was the final straw. I told X explicitly that I don’t trust him to deliver those mats, in spite of the sheet of paper he showed me with a big “IOU” written on it—would you trust a hand scrawled “IOU” like that? Would they trust that from me?
And so the deal fell apart. But not entirely! Even then, I was willing to wait and try again when our tempers had cooled. So I waited through the weekend and texted Monday morning asking again to see all the paperwork by email. No response until Tuesday, when the mats came in, and I got a text from a different sales manager saying to trust that the numbers are the same as agreed, and let’s do the deal today. So, again, nothing by email.
That’s when I gave up. I ended up soliciting bids from all the other Hyundai dealerships in NJ, and I found one—Lester Glenn in Tom’s River—that was completely straight with me, communicated entirely by email, was willing to send all docs by email in advance, undercut Route 1’s price by about two and a half thousand dollars, and that threw in some extras (carpeted mats, first aid kit, cargo netting) for free too. Stay away from Route 1.
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