Your Dodge story is almost verbatim what happened to my wife & I at the Ford store in the post. Until now I’d never heard of it happening anywhere else but this makes me think it might be a more widespread tactic.

Walmart will raise prices to its suppliers w/a 30% margin. So this $160mil in cost will end up making them $48mil in profit when they pull it from the hides of their suppliers.

Come on up to Arkansas. Like Texas, only worse in nearly every measure.

I bought my Mustang through a Mazda store which happened to be in the same franchise as a Ford dealership. That is how badly I wanted to avoid interaction w/folks at Ford.

Not sure if this counts, but about 16 years ago I watched some nerdy, balding tech venture capitalist in an ill-fitting suit talk about how the vaguely Lotus Elise-looking roadster next to him could go 0-60 in 4 seconds, travel over 200 miles on a charge and was 100% electric.

The reason I keep going back to Ford is that I help friends, family & co-workers with the car search, dealership, and purchasing experience. Sort of like a dollar store Tom McParland. But free.

We go through the Ford stores because, unfortunately, Ford makes some attractive vehicles from a styling, cost and content…

Where to start? Why not at a local Ford store, where 100% of my “worst dealer stories ever” take place (the one below is the most egregious of 4 or 5... but the fact that I have 4 or 5, out of thousands of dealership interactions & dozens of cars purchased over 25 years and ALL OF THEM are at Ford stores is saying…

Yes. The C3 was the chariot of Astronauts. The C3.5? Corvette Summer.

These are all terrible suggestions. Those that dress up nice aren’t fuel efficient. Those that are fuel efficient don’t dress up nice.

A few other publications have done first drives of the 2023 Sequoia already. Was Jalopnik not invited to the party?

I came back from an overseas deployment in 2006-2007 to approx 15,000 additional miles on the odometer of my car (not to mention mechanical/body/interior damage).

4 months late to the party but I guarantee they do. Perhaps not on every car, but every car I’ve driven in the past 30 years. To include the Panther platform Town Car.

Eerily similar experience here. There was one person in the entire dealership franchise who was “qualified” to I guess explain / let us test drive the Ioniq 5. Dealing with this guy was fine. Very informative, zero pressure.
Once we were done however, he handed us off to the “closers” and it became just another old…

I’ve seen it too, on an Elantra. Brand new, 2022 in a metallic grey with delivery mileage and a bubbling clearcoat. It looks like bird droppings sat on it too long & etched the clear, or someone spilled brake fluid on it during transport. Either way, a bad look & one that should have been caught during whatever PDI/PPI…

Couldn’t agree more. I thought w/Genesis that maaaaaaybe they’d adapt their tactics but nope. Full disclosure, I only went to 3 and 2 of them were the same franchise but different locations. But they were all identical in how they treated us. The dealerships are “the” number one reason we didn’t go w/an Ioniq 5 when…

1st gear: Can Hyundai/Kia spend a bit of that perhaps giving their dealers some incentives to stop being absolutely the worst place this side of a Ford store to buy a car & get it serviced?

HMMWV.

As much as I despise Arkansas and ~70% of the people here, the roads in the Ozarks and Ouachita ‘mountains’ (hills, really) are pretty excellent.