| rev:text
| - Buyer beware: Possibly deceptive business practice!
My wife and I had been looking for about three weeks to replace her aging Honda. We visited Fairway a few weeks ago and were greeted by a wonderful young sales associate named Carlos. He showed us a couple of well-priced vehicles, but they were not exactly what we were looking for so we looked elsewhere for a week or so. My wife then found a great deal at Fairway on a used, 2015 Chevy Traverse 2LT, well equipped and well under blue book value at $22,600 or so.
We went to inspect it and took it for a test drive. My wife fell in love with it, which was very unlike her as she is not at all a car person. We did not bring our trade with us so we returned home to pick it up for an appraisal. After the appraisal, we were shocked when the sales consultant, Carlos again, showed us a Carfax report that he claimed showed our trade had air bags deployed (as a note we are the sole owner of this vehicle and while it had been in two minor accidents, I knew the airbags never deployed). We were not given the opportunity to handle the Carfax report, but from his hand I did see a warning triangle indicating something was wrong. The sales manager stated they could not sell the vehicle on the lot and it had to go to auction, which if the airbags had deployed, I'd completely understand. They offered one third of the vehicles value and we politely declined and left.
We went home and the following Monday I immediately contacted both insurance companies involved in the two accidents, as well as CarFax directly. None, including CarFax had an indication of airbag deployment or any other significant, depreciative value. The woman at CarFax went so far as to send me a free report to corroborate her findings for myself. The triangle the sales associate was pointing out seemed to correspond to the generic triangle CarFax uses to identify any issue with the vehicle, to include accident history, regardless of severity (I am not an expert on these reports, so if anyone has additional information please let me know and I can modify this review as appropriate).
With intentions of going back to the dealership to revisit he issue, we found the price of the vehicle had gone up to around $26,000. It was then I began to suspect they had recognized they made an initial pricing error and used a faulty CarFax to buy enough time to re-price it and sell it. Though only speculation, nothing else makes sense to me. Why not just be honest and say they made a mistake in initial pricing.
It gets worse, I tried to call the General Manager, who I was told was TJ, and he NEVER returned my call. I then called a customer service representative, who seemed eager to help and she told me that she would immediately investigate first thing Monday morning (this was Saturday). She also, to date, has not called me back. The vehicle appears to have sold since then, a true disappointment.
It is true what they say about car dealerships. Very, very manipulative and deceptive indeed. You can tell a lot about how a dealership responds to its customers, and I remain unimpressed.
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