The mechanic I took it to said that the van is not worth more than $3000 at most
and that the emergency brake cables are gone. It's a three hour job to fix, and
it would cost around $400 since the cables cost $100 apiece and there are two
of them and it looks like it's been that way for awhile. He said it's obvious
that the dealership knew this since there was a fresh zip tie on the emergency
brake where it was broken. I went back to the dealership and spoke to the guy
in the office who the salesman referred to as the boss, Josh Brown -(they try
to pull the good cop bad cop thing on you here.) I told him about the missing emergency brake
and told him if he'd fix it there for free, I'd buy the car. He said, NO. I
said, just to see what he would say, "Well, when it comes time for
inspection, it won't pass without that and it's around a $400 job. Are you going
to put an inspection sticker on the car for me when it comes time for
inspection next year?" He said, "NO I can't put a sticker on it with
no emergency brake." I said, "You JUST DID!" He didn't know what
to say. Then he said that Lakeside didn't
inspect it (NOTE: remember the other guy told me they DID inspect it there) and
said that the person who traded it in had it inspected somewhere at some time
before trading in the car. I asked him how the car passed his "safety
inspection" with no emergency brake and he said they "must have
missed that". That's pretty bad... lying to customers about the vehicles
passing a "safety inspection". I had my daughter with me the second
time I went there and I told the salesman, "I can see how angry you get
when I ask about the condition of the vehicle. But do you understand that I'm
going to be putting my daughter in that car? You say you have a daughter, so
you should understand." He replied, " When we had it in the garage,
it passed a safety inspection".

Here are a couple other very dishonest things
they did over there:

1) Whenever I questioned anything, the salesman Barry Bidwell would raise his
voice, get in my face, and say things like, "HOW LONG have you been
without a car again??" (probably because I told him the first day I met
him, when he came to look at my trade in,
that I bought that last car for more than it was worth, because I was without a car for two months and
couldn't stand being without a car anymore.)
They also kept telling me I would not get financed anywhere else but
there since they use more banks than any other car dealer and my credit was
bad, and they got me financing at the last bank they tried. Although, when I
went in to sign the contracts, Josh told me that the company that financed me
Credit Acceptance is the largest financing company in the country. They wanted to keep making me feel that I had
no other options but to do business with them or have no car at all.

2) Trying to trick me into signing for add-ons to
the loan that I did not want without telling me that he added them to the
contract, and not saying what they were. I happened to have a brochure with me
about protecting oneself when buying a car from a dealer that listed some
dishonest and crooked tactics they may try on customers to get more money out
of them. He was trying to make me sign the pages without looking at them and
when I wanted to look at what I was signing, he was getting agitated. When he
told me to "sign here" I looked at it first and it said I was signing
agreement to add $600 to the loan for credit insurance. I told him I didn't
want it. He said then the loan won't go through then and I can't buy the car. I
showed him the brochure I brought with me that I printed off a consumer
website, that said that was an illegal tactic because as it said right on the
contract, declining the credit insurance has no impact on getting the
loan. He said, well if you don't take
it, they'll make you pay your loan off sooner. You'll have to pay it off in 18
months instead of 24. I asked him to call the loan company so I could verify
that. He said that is impossible because it's all done over the internet. I
asked him to show me where on the internet it says that. He didn't know what to
do next, he was thinking, and then showed me "See, here it says that
you'll have to pay the car off in 18 months if you take that off instead of 24.
I noticed on the screen that the term went down from 24 to 18 months, but the
payment stayed very close to the same amount! What he DIDN'T say is that the
reason for that is because I'd be borrowing LESS money! How crooked is that, what he tried to
pull! I said, I don't want the credit
insurance. Go ahead and give me the 18 months instead of 24. He said, if I do
that you'll have to wait here another 45 minutes. (I had been there all day
again for unknown reasons and he knew I wanted to get out of there. This is
another dishonest car dealer tactic...they keep you there all day to wear you
down so you'll agree to anything just to get out of there. They're just fooling
around chatting with each other, eating, etc during this time so there is not
really a valid reason for making you wait.) I said go ahead. I'll wait. Well,
all he did was reprint the document and it took less than a minute! See: Car
Dealer Scams #46 -Purchase Add-Ons to "Qualify" for Loan
This is when a dealer tries to force you to buy an add-on such as an extended
warranty, saying it's "required" by the lender due to your credit.
Rolling any additional product or service into your loan as a required item is
a scam. - See more at: http://www.realcartips.com/scams/#used

3) They told me that the minivan was worth 6000
and they were doing me a "favor" by selling it to me for $4200. I
looked up on Kelly Blue Book and Edmunds Fair Market Value site what the actual
cost of that van from a dealer should be. Now the van has a lot of rust along
with the interior being very dirty, and
no emergency brake, high miles, broken piece off the front bumper, so it would not be considered excellent
condition - it's closer to fair condition. The two rating sites I looked at
said that in this zip code area, to buy it from a dealer, that vehicle is worth
for no more than $3675 in the BEST condition. When I told them that, the
salesman said those sites mean nothing. They aren't accurate, and his
dealership uses Nada. So I looked it up on the Nada site and it said the same
thing. I told them this and they said it wasn't correct even though I had the
printout.

4) Since they would not tell me the condition of
the van, I asked if at least I could get
some kind of warranty. The salesman said he would have his boss Josh Brown
"throw in a warranty - how's that?". When I asked Josh about it he
said, "It will make your payment go up and your loan cost more." I told him that is not what "throw
in" means. So he said he'd give me a ONE MONTH warranty on power train
ONLY. Well, when I signed the contract papers I noticed that the paper said the
warranty was for 50% of the parts and labor. Not a full warranty as was agreed
to. That doesn't sound like they have
much confidence in the vehicle does it?

I want everyone to know what kind of dishonest behavior
goes on to in this

They were wonderful. They were very responsive and professional.

AS ABOVE.