Dealer scammed me :(

bvl

Breath deeply...its OK a few redline runs when warmed up is not going to grenade an engine. Those 7 miles on brand new cars? How do you think they get accumulated? Lots of cold starts and moving the car a few hundred feet is how...its OK, they survive fine.

As for the financing, I don't think it was a scam: sounds simply like a royal fsck-up on their part. There is no way you should have left the dealership without first signing finance paperwork which lists the lender, the rate etc...meaning its an approved load.

I agree: very strange, but doesn't mean dealer financing sucks. I have done it several times as well and the rates were the same as many banks...credit unions are where the best rates often are (so I refi'd my load after the fact )

Learn and move on...its all good.

- b

RunNgun

Oh I did sign paperwork. I went through the exact same process I've been through in all my other purchases. About 10 yellow carbon copy documents half a mile long, dozens of signatures, and what appeared to the same overall receipt I am used to getting. I had my apr on there, the car's sale price, my trade in value, the bank the loan was from, interest payments, total financed, etc etc etc.

What I didnt notice was at the top of every single page was a title saying "Conditional sales agreement". Keyword -> Conditional. At at the bottom of page one is fine print saying "this sales agreement is conditional upon lender financing at the dealers sole discretion". There's the scam. Aside from the fact that the entire thing is engineered to look like your normal sales agreement, even after you get approved the dealer can reject the approval if they arent satisfied with it, i.e. 2.75% APR is just too low for them and they want to artificially inflate it a couple of points and pocket the difference. The whole experience was so legit in appearance I didnt even once consider the paperwork wasnt final. They did good.

This is actually my bad. I noticed the ODO immediately when I turned it on at the dealer, but I chose to ignore it because I just wanted to drive my new baby home. I then quickly self-rationalized that maybe it wasnt flatbedded to the dealer but instead couriered and that there was nothing that could be done about it, so I might as well just live with it.