Smart pushback “You picked the route, Uber, you own this”.

“I’m not even sure how he registered and insured the thing for the 5 months after the “sale”. Sounds like either Texas has horrible records or they didn’t bother to register or insure it at all.”


For this part, I could see it happening.

In Utah, where I am, if you purchase a car at a dealership, they handle registering…

Well the vehicle didn’t technically belong to him until he made the last payment. It was still owned by the dealership. Same way if you only make 71 out of 72 payments the bank can roll up and take your car as well. The title will have a lien on it and the insurance should have the lender as primary payee in the event…

The funny thing was that it did belong to them. The kid was essentially in possession of stolen goods. Guaranteed there was a lien on that title that allowed them to repo that car legally.

And let’s see if I’ve got this straight... the “freelance salesman”   had bought the car from them and fallen behind on his payments... but they hadn’t repossessed the car from him? And then when he sold the car (which wasn’t his to sell), they repossessed it from the buyer?

There have been other news stories about the rampant temp tag fraud in Texas. I picture it going down like this:

“Freelance salesperson” prints him a temp tag from the dealership, saying that he’ll hand over the title as soon as he (the salesperson) gets the lien off it. Months go by and the temp tag is about to…

You’re welcome.  He was a great man.  We’ll get into his failings some other day.  Like the time he set himself on fire with a can of gasoline.  He was the local Volunteer Fire Chief at the time!

They let a “freelance” salesman, their words not mine, work out of their office. I’d say the responsibility falls on them. Any company whose employee goes rogue on the job owns that mess, that’s the way it works, for better or for worse.

And it’s a rental, so payload capacity is basically infinite so long as you can get it back to the parking lot.

Back in the 1960's my Grandfather was a partner in a small ruralish Ford dealership. He was a real good ol’ boy from Arkansas transplanted into small town Washington State, who looked, sounded, and acted just like Andy Griffith.

Jalopnik’s latest round of hires are all from the BuzzFeed School of Journalism and couldn’t tell you the difference between news and clickbait. Gone are the days of Doug DeMuro and numbered are those of Torchinski and, you know, writers who write things we actually want to read. Sadly we’re all here because…

The other dealer didn’t screw him though. It was the “salesman” who scammed them.

Regardless of their motivations, it’s nice to see they did the kid a solid. 

Welcome to jalopnik where the words mean nothing and only the clicks matter.

...the ironically named James Steelman.

Yeah, give the PR guy a raise. This was probably cheaper than buying a TV ad and I’m sure will sway a lot more buyers to shop at their dealership instead. 

It was Granddad. But yeah, who knows. Maybe he’s just from another time when we used to trust people

I’m sure the PR value they’ll get from this is far above what the car cost them.

It’s clearly a used car. GM dealers are allowed to take non-GMs in trade, yaknow.