Why are KIA Dealerships just awful compared to others? (My experience in Phoenix AZ area)

[kiakane]

My goodness. I've been out shopping for a vehicle for the last 2 months or so. Been to multiple dealerships from Honda, Toyota, GMC, Chevy, Ford and now Kia (looking for the Telluride).
The Kia dealerships here in AZ are two notches below most others with level of sophistication, transparency and service. Most of the time they treat me like I am wasting their time and when they do give me answers, they don't know hardly anything about their vehicles.
I know (much) more about the Telluride (and other Kia vehicles) than their salespeople do just from reading a few articles and watching some videos. This is their job for goodness sake... do they not have time to watch a few YouTube vids and learn about your own vehicles and how the safety features work?
I really like the Telluride in theory, but I'm not sure I can suffer the sales process with one of these places :/

 

[AnyVare]

And it's for those reasons that KIA and Hyundai will have a hard time moving $50K vehicles.

 

[Kamauxx]

I agree the dealerships suck. I don't think they'll have any trouble selling Tellurides, though. Most will be sold for low to under $40k. If one hits $50k it's due to dealer markup.

 

[Bruce_wayne8887]

I can confirm they do seem less professional than Honda or Subaru dealers we visited. Our Hyundai dealer ship was wonderful to us but is owned by the same family that owns the Honda dealership. Has anyone also been told that of you do Kias special 1.9% financing at 60 months or 0.9% at 48 months you lose a 1500$ rebate? I thought it was both?

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[Sal Collaziano]

They're not all bad. It's hit or miss with Hyundai and KIA - but they are getting better...

 

[Dandy]

^^^Lets hope!

 

[ucinn]

Our dealership is great, but there are horror stories everywhere. One here in Cincy is shady and I won't go to it ever. I have found that is true in pretty much every non luxury brand out there.

 

[critrider]

As long as the service department is competent, I could care less about the sales force tactics or attitude. I make it a point to not set foot inside a dealership until the deal is sealed and I'm signing paperwork. Look up the highest level sales manager and or the internet sales manager and negotiate via e-mail. Sure you need to test drive something but I always separate those two tasks. If the service guys are shady then yea that's a problem especially if there are no dealerships within a reasonable driving distance from you...

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[ucinn]

As long as the service department is competent, I could care less about the sales force tactics or attitude. I make it a point to not set foot inside a dealership until the deal is sealed and I'm signing paperwork. Look up the highest level sales manager and or the internet sales manager and negotiate via e-mail. Sure you need to test drive something but I always separate those two tasks. If the service guys are shady then yea that's a problem especially if there are no dealerships within a reasonable driving distance from you...

I do the same and that's how I found the shady bait and switch dealer in Cincy. Had a deal all worked out on a Stinger GT2 with price and everything through the internet manager. Made an appointment and he said he would be there. He wasn't, nobody else there knew of our deal, but being prepared as always I had printed out our email deal from start to finish including stock# and a pictiure of said car. The sales manager said they couldn't homor said deal because he thought we were talking about a different car even though the stock# was clearly listed more than once. Needless to say, I walked out, left a bad review on the FB page and will never go back.

 

[Ovibos]

I'm in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and I drove almost an hour to McGrath in Arlington to test drive a Telluride today. Low hassle, no drama.

Partly this is because Grossinger near me doesn't have any yet, and partly because Grossinger ticked me off with emails and phone calls every 2 hours after submitting an 'internet pricing request' via USAA/TrueCar. On top of that, they don't read responses to the emails and their unsubscribe links are busted. So I reported their CAN/SPAM violations and will likely keep schlepping far away to their competitors.

Annoying customers isn't going to win business.