I will start by saying that I did not want to have to write this review, and gave SoCal Preowned every opportunity possible to avoid this.
At the beginning of the year I began searching for a very specific car, that being a 2016 or older Model S with a sunroof in all black. So Cal preowned happened to have this exact car in the form a 2015 Model S 85.
Upon seeing the listing I called and scheduled a test drive, knowing that if everything was as listed, I would likely buy the vehicle, as it is a very hard one to find. I met Mario, who was kind, but certainly did have many concrete answers. He more of a yes guy trying to get the sale.
After the test drive I concluded that the car had some issues, mainly that sunroof did not work properly, there was some odd adhesive on the dashboard no one bothered to clean up, the tail light was out, there was excessive road noise, and a blinker malfunction. However, non of this was enough to not get the car if the deal was right.
Now the deal, is laughable. Mario came out with a little piece paper, and all it had on it was what my monthly payment would be. I did openly laugh. Where's fine print? How is this breaking down? Why is it so high? As everyone here seems to know, they tack on a $4,000 fee to the list price automatically for some special kind of coating to the paint. When asked about this Mario's response was "Well would you have come to check out the car if it was $4,000 higher?" No sales person should ever say this. They also tried to sell me on a 11% interest rate.
Luckily I knew exactly what I needed to pay monthly, what interest rate I needed, and how long I wanted that term to be. After much back and forth and numerous walk outs, they gave me exactly what I asked for in the first place.
Lesson here, this place could be fine as long as you know exactly what you want to buy and what you want to pay and stand firm until you get it.
I had it written into the contract that they would address the issues with the car as part of the deal. This was a nightmare. Knowing I had a trip coming up I took the car for a few weeks and then scheduled to bring it back in just before my trip. Mario greeted me and I went over all of the things that needed to be addressed. He assured me they would all be taken care of, yet he wrote nothing down. I said "are you sure you got all of the items?" Since it's a Tesla, I watch it through the app just sit on the lot for basically two weeks. Then when I returned the car still was not ready. After a lot of non answers and misinformation, they told me they were waiting on specific part for the sunroof. All together they had the car for over a month. That's a month of me paying on vehicle that I can't drive, and having to work around not having a car.
Once I picked the car up the sunroof did work, but nothing else had been address. The adhesive hadn't even been removed. I wiped it once to goo gone and it came off. How hard would that have been to address? The tail light was still out. Blinker, road noise, etc...
After mentioning this Hector told me to take it Tesla and send him the invoice, that he would reimburse the repair. So I did, and sent the $1,300 invoice immediately. Now it has been two months and no reimbursement. Not only that but every time I called I was promised a call back. To date, I have never been called back once.
This place has very shady business practices. And while everyone I dealt with was kind, they ultimately lost a potential repeat customer, and garnered this review, over many little items that could have been easily addresses. Even if someone told me "Hey this invoice is larger than we expected, we can only cover x?" That would have been something, but to just ignore a customer, it's unacceptable. read more