Just because you were taking care of doesn’t change them Into a good place of business.
They need to take care of all the customers that were short changed. Not just customers who placed orders prior to January. And I am sure they KIA AND THE DEALER LOST some customers to buying different vehicles.
Agreed.
The GM claimed that Murray had no paperwork on these orders, which is not true. I provided our purchase order and deposit receipt. He dug in further by also saying there was nothing to honor or not honor because the vehicle doesn’t exist, and that it hasn’t been picked up by KFOS. I sent a long, firm response stating that any of your circumstances are based on your own decisions, including to purchase or not purchase the dealership.
He backpedaled and said if our order fills, we will get it at the terms we agreed, and if it doesn’t fill we can take our deposit back or pay up for another unit. So my concerns moved on to whether they’re going to intentionally withhold our car or sell it to someone else until they make enough money to start fulfilling orders like ours.
Can you share what you got out of the conversation with Jake?
There wasn’t much to glean from the discussion. I wrote him a long email explaining our individual situation and we should assume he or someone there is now monitoring this thread.
He went through a brag about how many dealerships he owns, his country wide best customer service, highest volume kia dealer, etc.
he got into a tangent about how much tellurides are going for at Mannheim which claims is $10k over msrp for used (as though any of us can go to Mannheim without a dealer license lol), said he has customers willing to pay $30k over msrp.
Much of what he told me had very little to do with our specific order, but I mentioned that people have been waiting a long time to have this car pulled from under them, and further that as rates go up and so will my payments. I also told him as a former car salesman that I never would have thought I’d pay msrp for any car, but this is the car we wanted to get and felt it was something we could make happen at a price we felt was fair. We left it at he “will get us our car and at a price much lower than Mannheim and near msrp”. It was a lot of fluff and little substance, as he tried to build value for selling the car over what we agreed to pay. I appreciated that he got in touch with me, but his position is purely to make a lot of money.
He also said they were not told of the Telly orders until the day before/of closing the transaction. Mentioned that Murray was struggling financially because of their business model.
Unfortunately some of that does add up, but we would never know the financial state of Murray before the sale. Dealerships have floor plan financing, meaning they start to making payments after X number of days (normally 45) of a car sitting on the lot. So if they’re moving cars pretty quickly, they make pure profit. And the dealers do not pay msrp for the units.