Dealing with the car

Having the wife’s car totaled and being laid up after a knee replacement is not a fun situation. My wife was lucky and only received minor injuries and some unwanted trauma in her life, how did we know replacing the car would be more traumatic?

Once we were informed the car was totaled, we made what we thought was a good decision and went back to our dealer to get a replacement. I mean we’d just bought a car there six months ago so this one should be a breeze, right? Well, not so much. I think a lot of this started off with some poor assumptions on my part (I’ll admit, I doubt I was thinking super clear as I was still pretty uncomfortable from the knee replacement.) and there were miscommunications with the dealership too. This should have been pretty easy. It turned out to be: Complicated.

My first failed assumption was; Hey, I’m an existing customer, you should have all my information and realize I’m not some yahoo off the street. Seems between the time we bought the last car and this attempt; they had changed over to a fully computerized system and all the paper records were in archives somewhere away from the dealership. The original purchase had gone well with the exception of my Report of Military Service (DD214). They needed a copy of the document and I don’t carry a DD214 copy on me, so I needed to email it to them.  It took about a week back and forth because, I don’t know, and when they finally got the email, they said the scan was too faint to read. We finally just hand carried a copy to them.

I had also purchased a prepaid maintenance plan with the car. Again, making the assumption that this could just be transferred to the new car seemed logical, and the Sales Manager at the moment told me it would be no problem.  My failure was to get that in writing. That came up a bit later.

My last screw up was not insisting on being assisted by an experienced salesman. Ali, the kid we ended up with was all enthusiasm, but he had no experience with how the processes worked so he was as much in the dark about the processes at the dealership as we were. Things were complicated by the fact that there was not a car on the lot that met our needs. This meant one on the incoming cars would be tagged for us and that was fine. We couldn’t buy the new car until we had the insurance payment and we expected that to take a couple of weeks. We didn’t need the car immediately as I wasn’t going back to work for a month anyway. That first day, we spent about 2 hours trying to get everything front loaded so when the car arrived, it would be simple. Again, great concept, but it didn’t execute well.

We were given expectation of 3 to 4 weeks for the car to arrive (It was in shipment from Korea) and we were fine with that. Someone at the dealership apparently was a bit more antsy about getting me a new car and they found another Sonata hybrid at a sister dealership and had it driven in to Round Rock. We got a call after 10 days saying your car is her, come and get it. Having learned a long time ago, that you often cannot get things done over the phone, we agreed to come in that afternoon to talk about it. I had made it clear early in the process that nothing was going to happen before I had the insurance money in hand, but that doesn’t stop some sales managers.

Ali, the salesman, had full confidence in us coming in to buy, but apparently the sales manager on duty was concerned as we had nothing in writing on this new car. We show up that afternoon and look at the car, and we agree that it will do. This is when Ali asks us for a post-dated check to hold the car. I’m already irritated with having been called in early when we’d agreed to 3 or 4 weeks (which would have given us time to collect on the other car) and this really put me off. I told Ali to get the sales manager. The Sales Manager comes trotting out (not the same one I’d talked to 10 days ago of course) and starts giving all kinds of excuses as to why they need some monetary tool (post-dated check, credit card etc.) to hold this car until we can buy it. I told him, he was free to sell the one they had and we could order another and then he goes on about how they’d busted tail to get this one there. At this point, I just sat back and said: “Get me the General Manager.” He seemed taken a bit aback and trotted off to the office. Apparently, somewhere in the office a bit of clarity emerged and all of a sudden holding this car for a week or two was no problem. Leaving that afternoon, Anna and I discussed going through another dealer, but we decided that we were likely over most of the bumps in the process. Alas, we were not.

While the dealership was a pain in this process, USAA (My auto insurance provider) was such a divergent difference. The day after I had the discussion with the Hyundai dealer, they messaged me that the payoff balance had been transmitted to my bank. Knowing that even an electronically transmitted draft is not immediately accessible, I patiently waited until I could confirm with my bank that the draft had cleared and I had the money available in my checking account. It also worked out that my eldest son and his wife flew in to visit and help with my spirits and this was a nice distraction. Based on our schedule for visiting and such, we setup with the dealer to pick up the car on Thursday.

We arrived at the dealer at the appointed time (10 AM) and figured we should be out in an hour or so and head to lunch. Boy, I was an optimist. This is when I learned that we were essentially starting from scratch. Everything was all computer driven and of course all our information was transferred into the system in the change-over. Being computerized, it was supposed to be faster, I would debate that. This was when I also learned that the pre-paid maintenance couldn’t be transferred, it had to be refunded. The refund had to come from corporate and so we’d have to buy it again on this car and wait for the check. This is also the point where I am again asked for my DD214, even though I have the disabled veteran plates in hand to put on the car. The finance manager was trying to be helpful but he’d been sandbagged by all the previous crap and I was losing patience.

There were some bright spots in the process, we actually got a better financing rate (it is amazing what you can do with an 857 FICO score) and the computerized paperwork process was kinda neat (touch screen LCD built into his desk) and so we got through endless paperwork electronically. Then were ran into the mailing address quagmire. It seems their system had no option for a mailing address different from the street address. This was problematic for us as our mail goes to a PO box and any postal mail sent to my street address, by post office policy, was returned to sender. We explained this in detail to the finance manager who told me they, by law, must write up everything to the physical address. We ended up with an empty assurance from the finance manager that he’ll make sure that the mailing address for everything is updated (especially with the finance company) to avoid any problems. Finally, at 1 PM, Anna drove off in her new car.

I got an email from Ali about needing another copy of the DD214, and I dutifully replied almost immediately with a very clear copy of the document that I’d printed off during the 1st encounter with the dealership. I had assumed this was a done deal until a couple of weeks later when the dealership office was again calling for the missing document. I returned to work by this time and I confirmed that I’d sent the email and it had not been rejected by the email server for the dealer. This left Ali as the glitch in the matrix. Ali had left car sales for greener pastures and of course no one had access to his dealership email. Anna said screw it and just drove over with a copy. A couple days later I got a check from the dealership and expected it to be the refund for the maintenance plan. Instead, it was the difference between what they charged and what my vehicle tag transfer fee cost at the clerks’ office. This prompted me to stop by and talk to my favorite finance manager (Cory) and it was at that moment, (while he was looking up the refund check) that I learned about a $50 fee and 13% proration of the refund. This just wasn’t going to fly. Lucky for Cory a senior sales manager was there and calmer heads prevailed, I didn’t get the money back. Instead, I got an upgrade on the service plan worth more than they were screwing me for (They still made a profit, but it was something I could take home to the wife). Another issue was the mailing address. We hadn’t received anything from the lender about the new auto loan. We’d gotten two copies of the payoff of the previous loan, but nothing on the new one (the same company was used). Anna got proactive and called them and of course they had our street address listed as our mailing address. (I wonder why the mail kept coming back?) She had updated the address information and I had an agreement to check with Cory in a week or so.

Seventeen days elapsed and I was so unsurprised that I hadn’t heard squat from Cory. I sent him an email and ask “What the F***” (WTF)? I also made a reminder with myself to stop by his office after work. Cory called me around noon, and let me know he’d gotten the email and was looking into where the check was at. I told him that was fine and I’d be there about 4:30 and we could talk. (This was about June 7th or so.) I arrived and he was busy on the phone, so I amused myself for the next 40 minutes or so getting popcorn, using the bathroom and getting a bottle of water from their fridge. Finally, he came looking for me and we scurried off to his office. The phone calls he had been making were about my refund check. It seemed that the check had been mailed May 30th, to the lender. The last information the dealer had was that there was an active lien against the car so any refunds were sent to the lender. Apparently, my presenting them with a totaled statement from my insurance company didn’t trigger them to ask if I’d paid off the loan. Cory had also called the lender and determined that they would either send us a check or apply the check from the dealer to the outstanding balance, and that would be our choice. He also learned that we had already updated the mailing address. I did manage to leave with the paperwork validating the service plan was updated and at this point I declared the new car purchase process complete. The refund check from the lender did arrive four days later.