[OT] Don't buy Mitsubishi!!

[Breakdaddy]

Ooookay, all the tree-hugging crap aside, I, too, had a bad run in with a dealership, and my credit is rock solid. It was a Dodge dealer (hmmm, mitsubishi and dodge are sales partners, no?), and they tried to raise my interest rate 3 percent a month after I bought a new Durango. Bottom Line? I took it back and told the salesman, "here are the keys pal, should I call a lawyer now or wait til after you tell me I cant have my old car back?"
After an hour and a half of wrangling with this guy and his boss, I ended up living out the terms of the ORIGINAL contract and had no further problems from Dodge thus far. This has been almost two years ago now and I still own this vehicle (which I love, I might add).

 

[hammymchamham]

The defered payment isn't that great. I work for a company that does a lot of car loans. We do new, used, and refinancing. I've delt with people who took the defered payment from Mitsubishi when they started it over a year ago. After the year was up, they'd get their letters and qualify for variously high interest rates. Anywhere from 12% to 19%. They had payments of around $700 to 800. All this for $25000 cars. Banks, credit unions, etc have various guidlines of what they will lend up to for a used vehicle. The company I work for used the Black Book ( URL=http://www.blackbookusa.com/]http://www.blackbookusa.com/[/URL] ). Our interest rate was around 4.5 to 5.5% for up to 60 months. Of course, for these people to finance, they had to come up with the difference between what they owed Mitsubishi and what we could finance at. The worst case was $10,000. Some people where able to come up with the difference, some are stuck with $700 payments.

The thing is, these people had GREAT credit. Most had higher than 700 (some had in the 770+ range). I think 1 of the 20 I have delt with over the last 3 months was a "horrible" 650.

Intrest rates for Auto loans are low. According to bankrate.com, Farm Bureau Bank has a posted rate of 4.88% (I looked under Huntsville, AL). Do yourself a favor, go finance today. If you don't, you may regret it in 8 or 12 months. No need to call a lawyer.

 

[Mercule]

I agree with CRGreathouse, get things in writing. But if they call you then by all means record the conversation. If I remember correctly as long as one side of the conversation knows it is being taped then it is perfectly legal to record. One could add a harrassment lawsuit on top of things if they keep up the "honey" routine towards your wife.

Be careful. The "one-sided permission" varies from state to state. AFAIK, it's valid in Iowa (my home state). I actually have a phone-recorder device that I got for a similar reason a few years ago. If you want to borrow it, email me and we'll work out shipping, otherwise, they're $15 at Radio Shack.

_Always_ read the entirety of a contract. A few years ago, I got a new bed with 1 year, no interest. Just before the last payment, I realized that the amount they'd been charging me monthly would only total up half the sales value. Fortunately, I had the cash on hand to pay the whole thing off. Had I let it slide just one more month, I would have been subject to a retro-active interest rate of something like 25%, including on principle paid in the first year (only compounding until the principle was paid, of course).

There are a _lot_ of sleazy practices out there.

 

[bloodymage]

My advice, tell them no deal and ask for your old car back. When that doesn't work, tell them that you'll be dropping off the new car along with the keys, and you expect to be reimbursed for the car they sold before your financing was approved. At that point the dealership will sometimes finance you themselves under the original terms in order to avoid potential legal problems.

Do not leave the car at the dealership. Whether you signed something "binding" or not will be decided in a court and may come out in your favor. I ended up with a $9,000 judgement against me for a $6,000 car because it was priced over Blue Book and I couldn't get financing for it. The salesman lied, out-and-out lied. I returned the car. They sued. They admitted they lied. I still lost!

Again, do not "drop off" the car. You signed the papers, it's yours, you hafta pay for it. And btw, car dealers suck! Good luck to you.

 

[Numion]

How is it possible that these kind of shady tactics seem to be so common among car dealers? This kind of fraudulent practices should taken care of by some agency. Granted, it's not drug dealing or murder, but it happens on a big enough scale to matter.

Not to turn this into a political debate, but that wouldn't fly where I'm from...

 

[daTim]

They also manufactured the Japanese Zero in WWII!!! When you ride in an Eclipse you ride with Tojo

 

[JacktheRabbit]

Does this mean if you drive a porsche you drive with Hitler?

They also manufactured the Japanese Zero in WWII!!! When you ride in an Eclipse you ride with Tojo

 

[Ashrem Bayle]

Man... this is a mess.

They are supposed to call when they get their proposal in writing.

The proposal and our contract is going straight to my lawyer. When I go up there, I'm going to have a tabe recorder on me. In Alabama, only one person has to know.

We'll see...

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

I am no advocate of Mitsubishi, but I can't tolerate ignorance. If you are going to make a stand on your environmental principles at least get the facts straight. Mitsubishi is not a conglomerate any more. After WWII allied forces put policies in place that forbade the old trade conglomerates. Most of the companies under the Mitsubishi name stopped using the name and symbol under pressure from the West and were split into numerous small, independant companies. Then the geopolitical attitudes changed and the old trading federations were seen in a different light. Most of the old Mitsubishi companies began using the name again and the three diamond symbol and formed many autonomous corporations. Each Mitsubishi corporation has about as much say in what another Mitsubishi corporation does as any other business community member, i.e. none. Mitsubishi Motors has no hand in logging, salt plants, or mining. Just as my former company, Mitsubishi Electric Automation, had no hand in these endeavors and could pressure the Mitsubishi operations doing so about as much as you or I could. It is sheer ignorance that made environmentalists start a letter writing campaign about the Mexico salt plant directed at my former company and ignorance on the part of your school to boycott Mitsubishi companies that had no control over the environmentally unsound practices of other companies that have a common bond in name only.

Although this looks like an underhanded dealership, there are other reasons not to buy Mitsubishi products. The conglomerate has a horrible environmental record, including logging and deforestation in Indonesia and Canada, wanting to build a desalinatino plant in Mexico in the middle of a Blue Whale nursery site, and coal and gas mining in Canada and Alaska. My previous school, the University of Minnesota decided to not purchase any capital expense (I think items over $500?) from Mitsubishi on the recommendation of the ethics committee and other schools boycotting Mitsubishi.

Bertman

 

[blackshirt5]

Buy American. I think this country would be a better place if more people like me and Dimebag Darrell lived here(we runs over aluminum christmas trees in his SUVs, I used to hit trees with alarming regularity in my black '76 Nova), so buy American, they're the only cars that can stand up to us.