Dealer experience I'd like to share - Orange County
Hello everyone,
I'll keep this as brief as possible. Some of you might have seen my earlier post about my K5 lease. Me, my wife and 3yo son, and my brother in law who was interested in a Telluride. So, we were looking to lease 2 vehicles.
This is coming from a Regional Director of a large textile retailer, who has been in the service industry for 25 years.
Either way, I leased a 2026 K5 GT-line Sunday the 9th from Kia of Irvine and my brother got the Telluride. I went to them initially, got a solid deal, but they didn't have the color I wanted, so I just wanted to visit some other dealers to see if I can get a similar deal on a color that I prefer. Went to Tustin Kia and Kia Garden Grove Sunday morning. This post is about the experience we had at the Tustin dealer.
We drove there around 11:00, sat down with a sales representative, started discussing what we need, what they can do, etc. We didn't mention the offers we already had. We were saving that for later in the negotiation. We told them the vehicle we need, and what we would like to pay, they came back with some numbers which were around $70 more monthly and only 10k miles.
We told them we had shopped around a little and already had an offer for much lower and if they could match it. The lady got a little frustrated and wanted to show our deal to the sales managers. She's like "can you send me that" (screenshot) and I told her I'd rather not share it, but they are free to look at it on my phone.
She disappears for about 5-10 minutes, then comes back with a sales manager named JACQUES MOSBY. Yes, I'm dropping his name because this gentlemen ruined our experience in about 2 minutes. He shook our hands, sat down and (very condescendingly) explained that this was the best they could do. He was very aggressive in his demeanor for some odd reason. He kept referring to the vehicle as "the GT", when we were negotiating a GT-Line. When I tried to explain how we were negotiating a GT-Line and not a GT, he just kept talking over me and cutting me off. My brother also stepped in and Jacques just wouldn't let us speak. He eventually said "alright I'll just shut-up and let you guys get out what you need to get out," again in a very condescending way. I had to ask him why he was being so aggressive, and he explained how he's been doing this for 40 years and I thought to myself, this guy has been doing this for 40 years, and he's still a Sales Manager at a car dealer.
I'm a 42 year old man, with my wife and child, and my brother is 52, being talked to like we're toddlers being disciplined. My wife had to actually remove herself and my son from the environment. He then looked at our offer as if he's seen it for the first time, started insulting the Irvine dealer, the way they put things down on paper, the different color pens they used for each stage of negotiations, etc., and said "I don't even know what I'm looking at" as if he's looking at Einstein's Theory of relativity. Then he said "anyway, this is the best we can do," basically telling us to fuck-off. We said thank you and he left the wobbly, broken table.
I had to get some words out of my system, So I went to his office and we exchanged some more words. Then we went back to thank the woman that was originally helping us. She was visibly shaken, as were we. She tried to calm us down, not knowing what else to do. I asked for his name, and told her they'd be hearing about this online. She tried to convince us not to do that, but rather speak to their GM. Which to me would be a waste of time, since they are obviously clueless and harboring employees like this.
In the end, we drove back to Kia of Irvine and leased two vehicles.
Long story short, Tustin Kia doesn't deserve your business, meanwhile Kia of Irvine was one of my best purchase experiences.