Insidious, seemingly innocuous ways dealers have screwed you?
For me, I bought a used car and they promised in writing on a signed we owe, a dent repair on a dent with cracked paint to bare metal. Turns out they only intended to PDR pull and slap touch up over the rust. This was not written or even verbally told to me. Only that they would fix it. I should have gotten the excruciating details, I know. I have reasons why I didn't, mostly that I thought they would honor the word repair and the car is in great shape otherwise, but that's irrelevant to their misleading use of the we owe as a sales tool.
They also promised a timing belt service at cost (meaning the dealer cost before any markups) and proceeded to invoice full MSRP. When called out, they invoiced a discount retail rate. I know the dealer, who has access to a franchise network which includes the brand i bought, isn't paying any retail price for parts.
Both invoices itemized only the parts explicitly listed on the we owe (timing belt and water pump) but no tensioner, coolant, etc. I asked about this and was ignored. If it was an error, they could have corrected it. I doubt they were going to eat the cost of a $200 tensioner and $50 coolant out of the goodness of their hearts. The GM later stated on tbe record at the DMV that he would never quote a timing belt service without a tensioner, if this is true why didn't be clear it up when I asked and why was it not on both of the clearly itemized invoices?
Were they going to reuse the old tensioner (a gamble on whether it will last another 105k miles) reuse the old coolant or not even change the water pump(replacing it is just standard practice because it's an expensive PITA if it breaks in 30k miles)?
Don't know, wasn't going to gamble my car on it.
Took it to the DMV board, they rubber stamped whatever the dealer said but I got a lot of juicy admissions from the GM and sales manager out of the audio transcript which the state provided so it's on to small claims.
I didn't want to sue them. I would have preferred the work done or more transparency to begin with so I could have decided whether to buy it knowing all the information.
What's really puzzling is they're a multi million dollar franchise and they've possibly already spent more fighting my complaint than simply doing the work or coming to a genuine compromise regarding the dent misunderstanding. Something like "hey we didn't mean we'd do full paint blending but if you pay for the paint we'll honor our word at our attached collision center."
Anyway that's my story and I'm interested in hearing if other people have been deceived in similar innocuous, borderline shady ways and what you did about it. I'd almost be willing to bet the amount of liability they shirk doing things that are borderline like this eclipses the egregious violations like hiding flooding damage or a bad transmission.