Mercedes Benz Financial Services (MBFS): Incompetence Personified

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24

Had basically the same experience with MBFS selling my MIL GLC to Carvana. They are extremely incompetent.

25

They’re also losing hundreds of millions of dollars. We don’t hate them, we watch them fail and laugh.

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26

They don’t care… they’re a high flying technology company on paper. All that matters is revenue. The difference between a traditional dealer and a site like Carvana is they have the ability to scale like wildfire. They can also do this with significantly less overhead as well. The only way to beat them is stricter lease language. Otherwise, enjoy low supply and overpaying at auction. Profit doesn’t matter to Carvana right now and investors won’t expect it. Just look at Uber…

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27

Auction buying is dead, we run 120+ used a month off trades. They can lose money and we will continue to make millions a year. Automotive groups can scale like wildfire too, look at Lithia in particular. The only difference is one company makes billions and the other loses billions.

Btw, Carvana doesn’t buy a ton from auction (less than 3% of cars run) but what they do buy they pay stupid money for.

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28

You’re going to scale with overpriced real estate and sales/management employees?

29

Yep, that’s how Group1, Lithia, AutoNation, Premier, and countless other groups have done it.

The only difference is they cashflow.

30

I wish you nothing but success, but I think they created a better mousetrap. Only time will tell.

31

Hmm, I’m not sure. My private payoff quote was the same as the quote they sent to Rodo, less the MSDs I had put down at inception. So, quote to Rodo was say $30000, I had $5000 in MSDs, so my private quote was $25000

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32

@Twodomes or anyone else have success selling their MBFS lease to a 3rd party dealer? I asked MBFS for a dealer quote, and they sent me what looks like a private quote with my name all over it. When I called back they said this is what they send to dealers. Then the rep said she would remove the last page that they only sell to the original lessee, and add the MSD back into the payoff and send me the doc again…that doesn’t sound right to me, i was expecting the dealer pay off quote should look different from the private pay off quote?

33

I had a friend at a MB dealer pull my payoff quote and compared it to my personal payoff online, and the only difference was that mine included sales tax.

34

Interesting. My pay off quote online, and the one MBFS sent me in the “purchase package” does not include sales tax. That’s what i sent to Vroom. But it has that line at the end that says they can only sell to the original Lessee.

35

Are you able to log into your MBFS account and view your payoff information there?

36

Yep it’s the same and does not include sales tax. Maybe it’s a CA thing. But my question was around, what document is carvana/vroom looking for? When I spoke to MBFS, they said there is only one letter that they have and that’s what they send to dealers.