It’s just a shame that dealership grift has to get this bad until the government enforces regulations properly.
I know on a smaller scaler that these things mentioned in the article happen all the time. In college I had classmates who worked at a dealership and they talked about all kinds of shenanigans they pulled.
For instance, it wasn’t all that uncommon for a relative percentage of the cars sold on the used lot to be from other states like Texas where they would buy low integrity vehicles and fix them to a minimally viable state before bringing them to California. This had something to do with how they could get a certificate from TX saying the car was okay for resale without conditions applied (IE they didn’t have to report the previous / original condition) and that was enough leeway to get it past state regulators if you didn’t do it to often
new cars had a bit less of this nonsense going on I recall because the manufacturers are more concerned and keep a closer eye on this sort of thing, though I’ve heard that often cars would come in from the factory with paint scratches and stuff from travel and dealers would just patch over it as quickly and cheaply as possible to get it on the lot without car for longevity
> It’s just a shame that dealership grift has to get this bad until the government enforces regulations properly.
Enforcement costs money, and one of the easiest ways to attack the government budget is to argue that enforcement "isn't working" because it isn't yielding offenses. A perfect enforcement regime with zero offenders starts look like major government waste.
"There's no business like car business I know" :-) In my first startup we hired a guy who had been IT at a large chain of dealerships in the Bay Area and he was chock full of stories like this.
Car dealership is one of the few businesses I know where I've heard more than one instance of the owners being effectively held for ransom by their (single) admin, for multiple years running.
What’s the exact fraud happening here? It’s implied in the article but not explicitly spelled out. Salvage vehicles are being rebuilt, and the title is doctored so as to not make it appear like it’s a salvage title?
> This isn’t the first time that Kazran has run into trouble with the law, either. Back in 2010, the Federal Election Commission filed a complaint against him alleging that he illegally reimbursed employees of his Florida dealership for close to $70,000 in political donations.
I'll give you two guesses, but you're only going to need one! To save you the work, it was for Vic Buchanan's campaign.
Every dealership employee should be in jail. There's 0 practical reason that cars need to be bought through a middleman. Every car buying experience I've had over the last 2 decades has been an absolute grift, except when buying directly from Rivian. Toyota, Kia, Audi, Honda, Ford: they've all tried to scam me.
I sure have! What I haven't done is advertise a car I'm selling as X, and then tell the person when they drive 2 hours to my place that it's actually X + $5k, oh and they have to buy $1500 "underbody protection", $2k "window vin etching", and a $3k extended warranty before they can drive it off my property.
It's a massive pain and why I founded www.keysavvy.com. We don't solve ALL the headaches (no-shows, low-ballers, undisclosed issues), but we eliminate payment and title fraud in private party transactions.
> Tesla isn’t exactly well known for their treatment of customers.
That comes after you have bought the vehicle. At least in my case, in Norway, buying the car was painless and at no point did the sales rep attempt to persuade me to buy anything extra or do anything shady.
However, their service organization stinks at some locations in both in Norway and in the UK but oddly for different reasons.
Every manufacturer would love this. Unfortunately dealerships are enshrined into law and Tesla had to go and get exceptions by law in each state it has dealerships
The moment a company sells one car online they lose support from every one of their dealerships nationwide. It's possible for a manufacturer to embrace this model when they are starting from zero, not so when they have millions in existing sales per year to worry about.
> HB 637, "Motor Vehicle Dealers, Manufacturers, Importers, and Distributors," bans most direct-to-consumer vehicle sales if the automaker has ever sold any model through a franchise in Florida before (i.e. every major automaker). Manufacturers that didn't already have a dealership agreement in the state before the law are exempt, which includes Tesla and presumably other new EV brands such as Lucid, Rivian and Polestar.
Do you mean existing dealers lobby against the exception? How would that survive a lawsuit? A state government giving one car manufacturer an exception and denying all the other ones?
Car dealerships are a huge revenue generating entity for state governments. It is possible doing away with dealerships would net out to similar incomes, but short term would most likely lead to a net negative for the balance sheet.
Dealership owners are probably one of the most successful "small" local business owners in most places.
Also, a lot of what people dislike about dealerships is at least somewhat orthogonal to the fact that they're dealerships rather than something owned by the manufacturer. Any dealership can institute "no haggle" sales, you're going to have to take your car to a local authorized place for service/warranty work/etc. in any case, and a lot of people need financing.
The last few years of shortages notwithstanding, to the degree you can walk into a dealership, point at a car and say I want that one (or I've come to pickup the car I've ordered), I've got my checkbook--a lot of the hassle disappears. Yes, there will be various annoying upsell attempts but that mostly involves just saying no a bunch of times.
(Yes, there are some incentives that dealerships have that a manufacturer-owned entity might not. On the other hand, the inverse is probably true as well.)
I know on a smaller scaler that these things mentioned in the article happen all the time. In college I had classmates who worked at a dealership and they talked about all kinds of shenanigans they pulled.
For instance, it wasn’t all that uncommon for a relative percentage of the cars sold on the used lot to be from other states like Texas where they would buy low integrity vehicles and fix them to a minimally viable state before bringing them to California. This had something to do with how they could get a certificate from TX saying the car was okay for resale without conditions applied (IE they didn’t have to report the previous / original condition) and that was enough leeway to get it past state regulators if you didn’t do it to often
new cars had a bit less of this nonsense going on I recall because the manufacturers are more concerned and keep a closer eye on this sort of thing, though I’ve heard that often cars would come in from the factory with paint scratches and stuff from travel and dealers would just patch over it as quickly and cheaply as possible to get it on the lot without car for longevity