Reign of Ravens
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2021
- Threads
- 5
- Messages
- 462
- Reaction score
- 506
- Location
- Hawaii
- Vehicles
- 22 Mach-E Premium, Chrysler PacHy
What you see on the website isn't always what you'll get. I contacted a dealer and confirmed via email that there was markup for cars on the lot, but not for cars ordered online. They wouldn't reply about forced add-ons (VIN etching, nitrogen in tires, exterior/interior protection coating... the usual BS most people don't want but dealerships charge a few additional thousand for without asking you). The website confirmed what they had told me, that the difference from MSRP was zero. Great! Two months in, when doing my weekly check on the order status, I saw that the difference from MSRP was now a few thousand dollars. All the dealer would tell me was that if they had promised me pricing, then they'd honor it, and even after showing them the email they had sent me, they'd just repeat that when I asked for confirmation if that meant my order was going to be sold at MSRP or not.
I'll have to go in person to get a direct answer out of them, and will try to get them to sign a pricing agreement with me on the spot as well, to prevent further nonsense like this. What Ford and the dealers are doing is incredibly misleading, and open to abuse. What's to prevent them from deciding to mark us up by $20,000 on delivery day, knowing that by then we've waited months for the car and might not have any more time to burn finding an alternate? They can refund the deposit and then sell the car on the lot with markup if we abandon the order (maybe not for $20,000 over MSRP, but still a few thousand more, which beats selling at MSRP).
What I am getting out of my experience is that you either should have them lay out all of the costs and then have them sign it (not just you - someone else had a horror story on this forum where they had the costs from the dealership, and their own signature, but the dealership refuted it because no manager had signed it), or have a backup plan ready to go by delivery day. These practices are unbelievably dishonest, but at least we're finding this out now, early on in our ordering process, and not on delivery day, when thinking clearly would be more difficult due to the excitement... but knowing that people are so excited on delivery day, maybe that's why the dealers are trying to do this, rather than being up-front from the start.
I'll have to go in person to get a direct answer out of them, and will try to get them to sign a pricing agreement with me on the spot as well, to prevent further nonsense like this. What Ford and the dealers are doing is incredibly misleading, and open to abuse. What's to prevent them from deciding to mark us up by $20,000 on delivery day, knowing that by then we've waited months for the car and might not have any more time to burn finding an alternate? They can refund the deposit and then sell the car on the lot with markup if we abandon the order (maybe not for $20,000 over MSRP, but still a few thousand more, which beats selling at MSRP).
What I am getting out of my experience is that you either should have them lay out all of the costs and then have them sign it (not just you - someone else had a horror story on this forum where they had the costs from the dealership, and their own signature, but the dealership refuted it because no manager had signed it), or have a backup plan ready to go by delivery day. These practices are unbelievably dishonest, but at least we're finding this out now, early on in our ordering process, and not on delivery day, when thinking clearly would be more difficult due to the excitement... but knowing that people are so excited on delivery day, maybe that's why the dealers are trying to do this, rather than being up-front from the start.
Sponsored
). In my case, the first dealer I called off that list had a "Modem Fee" for making the "car come alive" before I pick it up (no joke). The other dealer on that list was very honest, because they did not even want to sell me the car after a trip to the dealership, and emails, no response. In a way I appreciate that, don't sell something you don't make money on, unless you can say this is our ADM and in most cases reasonable people will pay a reasonable fee.
