I sold KIA’s during my 10 month car sales career. The experience is exactly as you describe here. Money always was far more important than integrity, customers were lied to all the time, and poor credit was the dealership’s forte:
“Get that person with the 580 Beacon score off that Honda Civic! We need to sell them on this back-of-book rental fleet Taurus so we can extract $8000 over cost! What??, they don’t want a Taurus??!! Then get them on the Pontiac Aztec or that Seabring now, have their senile grandpa co-sign for it!!@“
Or
“Oh good, it’s a non-white person with bad credit! Excellent! How does 29% APR and an 84 month payment plan sound on a Kia Sorento which literally has a residual value of 25%!”
A lot of dealers are complete scum. I truly regret having worked for one like this, but I learned a valuable lesson about what I did not want to be like.
I am currently leasing an optima, at the time I though I negotiated pretty well but since coming to this site I realized I was taken for a ride… one thing I’ve always wondered and haven’t been able to track down is the money factor on Kia leases. I called the Kia finance company and the person I talked to and asked was either completely ignorant or trained in playing dumb and avoiding answering those questions. Since you worked in the dealership, would you be able to give me a ball park on what the money factor is that they would charge for someone with 730 credit score ?
When I worked for Kia I never saw one car leased, we always pushed people to buy. This was in 2005, so the residual value must have been ridiculously low. Who wants to lease a $23000 car that is worth $7000 in 3 years?
No 1 reason I’d never consider a Stinger no matter how good the value. I was really interested in a Niro back when they came out, and the Kia dealer over here ran my credit without telling me they were running my credit, now I have a nice dip in my credit score.
I rented a Hyundai Ioniq recently and while there were many great things about that car, I couldn’t help but feel like overall it was a cheaply made shitbox.
My optima is a 16 with a msrp of around 31k the residual is terrible it’s 17k … my payments are 365 for a 36/10k a month for an optima … needless to say I can’t wait till my lease is up, I’d really like to get into a nicer luxury brand while keeping my payment around 350-375 a month but I won’t be able to seriously look till next summer. My lease ends sept 2019
I would guess that almost everyone who posts here has run into a few of these types. I’m like an elephant in that I haven’t forgotten and it taints how I deal with others in the business.
I’ve sworn off Hyundai/Kia for the simple reason that their warranty is total junk and they’re not even good liars. This includes corporate, who literally told me to sue them.
I would lease one because once I get past the BS it’s a good value car, but will never again own - after having 3 of them. Learned my lesson.
It really depends on the dealer and the amount of competition in a given market. I leased a 2012 Kia Optima and it was by far the fastest and lowest pressure sales process I’ve ever been through. The guy that leased me the car was even named Brad “Pop” Corns - no joke.
I worked with some very sweet and genuinely caring people too, but then again, my Sales managers were whip cracking overlords who would push your morals to a breaking point trying to get you to sell cars to drunk and senile people. I learned to obscure the truth, deal with extreme confrontation, and stand up for myself in that job when I was younger. It’s a tough job for sure and there are a lot of great people there too. I don’t mean to pigeonhole every car salesman. It really helped me to learn about myself.
Still, I don’t like how sales jobs can twist good people into believing that they are blameless or not complicit in a problem. There are just a lot of customers who are trusting lambs, they are not stupid people, they are just good natured, and after years of salesmanship, even a good honest sales person will believe those lambs deserve the slaughter they always do get. That mentality is a reality of the world we live in, but it’s not the world I want to help shape.
It’s a reality of the business, but dealerships are sort of like a “hard hat area” masked to look like a playground.
Almost every dealership is horrible and full of you-know-what.
Everything they tell you is a lie. Every number they show you is crooked. Anytime you try and disprove their lies you’re overthinking it and talking yourself out of a good deal.
Only when you get up to leave do they suddenly realize a mistake was made. “Oops, sorry.” What a surprise another math error in favor of the dealership by thousands and thousands of dollars. How come the math error is never in the customers’ favor? Interesting.
Then as you keep getting up to leave and they keep correcting the numbers eventually you actually approach a fair value and they began insulting and condescending comments about how unfair you are and they need to make a living and stop wasting their time.
And then when you still threaten to leave the price suddenly drops again. And then you counter lower and after another 30 minute argument they agree to the number verbally, never on paper, so that hopefully time will pass and they can pull the “oh that price was only for that exact second of that day when I could hide how much I’m losing on this deal.”
their dealers are absolutely the worst. had all the numbers on paper and showed up and they still changed them on me. Then told me “security etching” was requirement to buy car.
