We bought out our CLA 250 lease when it had one month left and this one month lease payment was added to the total buyout amount when we made our lease buyout payment.
Since two months ago, Mercedes has been harassing us with emails/letters/phone calls and telling us that we still owe them 1 month of payment although I’ve kept telling them that this payment was included in the lease buyout and received by the dealer. (The sales rep from my dealer also confirms I don’t owe anything to Mercedes).
A representative from Mercedes called me today and threatened me that they are going to give this to a collection agency which could hurt my credit. He told me the last month’s payment should not be charged by the dealer and Mercedes is looking for this money. And I told him my sales rep told me I don’t owe anything and this guy just straight up told me I should talk to their manager as sales reps can be unprofessional (which itself is a joke, he is blaming a customer for getting inaccurate information?)
What should I do in this situation? IMO, it’s the manufacturer’s responsibility to communicate with the dealer regarding problems like this and sort things out. I don’t mind myself getting involved but I don’t have the responsibility to help Mercedes collect their money from the dealer as I did not make any mistake and paid what I owed a while back.
1 month prior to the end of your lease, you purchased the vehicle, through a dealer (why go through a dealer?) and are now the owner. Do you have the title of the vehicle? How much did the dealer add in processing fees/inspections? Did you do the registration transfer yourself? What did the dealer give you as far as documentation?
It’s our first lease buyout experience and we were first contacted by the dealer regarding lease end options (return or buyout). So we naturally bought it from the dealer. Now that you asked, are you saying we could have bought it from Mercedes directly?
We received the title already. The registration transfer was done by the dealer. They did not charge additional processing fees apart from the government fees but unfortunately we did buy some prepaid maintenance pkg from them
In CA, one can usually just log onto their lease account and purchase the vehicle directly. Some brands have been cutting back on that, but I don’t believe that MB is one of them.
This really sounds like MBFS dropped the ball somewhere. You may need to escalate this up the food chain and you may need to get the dealer to cough up the buyout quote from MBFS. The only other thing that I could see having happened here is if the dealer processed your deal as an early lease return rather than a buy out, and then sold you the car after they took the lease return in. Did the title come from MBFS or from the dealer?
