I spoke with Brian, the used car sales manager, about selling my 10-year-old GMC Yukon with…read moreapproximately 130,000 miles. On our initial call, he gave me a valuation in the neighborhood of $12,000 to $12,500, with some flexibility depending on the vehicle's condition. He said, understandably, that he would need to see the vehicle in person before finalizing an offer. I completely agree with that. A used car's condition needs to be verified, and I have no issue with a price changing based on what is actually found.
What happened when I arrived, however, was completely different.
After looking at the Yukon and "crunching the numbers," Brian quoted $7,500. His explanation was that the vehicle supposedly needed approximately $3,500 in repairs.
The problem is that neither the numbers nor the explanation make sense.
Brian already knew this vehicle had exceptionally well-documented service history, including the fact that I had recently spent approximately $8,000 at this dealership replacing the transmission and the entire AC system. Those are two major repairs on a Yukon of this age and mileage, and they had just been completed. He had access to the service records and knew exactly what had been done.
More importantly, the math simply does not work. If the initial valuation was approximately $12,000 to $12,500 and the alleged repairs were $3,500, that does not logically get you to a $7,500 offer. And using retail repair costs to justify a dealer's acquisition price is also misleading, because a dealership is not paying retail customer pricing for repairs.
I also told Brian that Carvana had offered $12,000. His response was that I should take it because Carvana is a national company that would likely send the vehicle to auction rather than retail it. The irony is that on our initial conversation, Brian had described the same basic approach for his dealership, that they could take the vehicle and send it to auction. Once I was standing there with the car, however, the explanation changed to, essentially, "we would need to repair it before we could sell it."
I drove to the dealership based on the valuation Brian had discussed with me, only to have the offer reduced by roughly $5,000 after I arrived, with no credible explanation for how the numbers got there.
If this isn't a classic bait-and-switch, I don't know what is. It was an absolute waste of my time, and frankly, an insult after having just spent thousands of dollars having major work done at this same dealership.
Very disappointing and, in my opinion, extremely unprofessional. I would expect much more transparency and integrity from a dealership, especially when dealing with a customer who has a vehicle with extensive service records from that very dealership.
