The funny thing about shopping for a car is that most of the time you go in expecting the very least of your car salesperson. You don’t trust the information they give you, and you don’t trust their car suggestions, because they could have ulterior motives. For example, that great car that they think it would be awesome if you bought? Might just need to get it off the lot as fast as possible. And the questions you ask about how a car handles? Just trying to sell it. The funnier thing, though, is that they feel the same way about you.
According to the attendees of the National Automobile Dealers Association convention recently held in Las Vegas, the biggest problem in the auto industry is customers who don’t tell the truth. Big surprise for the rest of us.
According to the average car salesman, the dishonesty of a customer can make getting a deal on a car purchase together an uphill battle, because all the information that they need for the deal is just the kind of information that the customer will embellish (just a bit). Inaccurate data about trade ins, mumbling protestations of a good credit rating, and back and forth playing about how much money they have to shell out can really slow down the process and make it impossible to broker a deal.
However, a lot of times this ‘dishonesty’ is not the fault of the customer. The customer, most of the time, may be unaware of the true condition if his trade in. And car salespeople don’t know how much you can afford to pay per month by looking at the pay check stubs you provide because they don’t know your situation. Heck, if you slept in the trunk of that new car and ate only Ramen, you could probably pay it off in just a few months. But that’s silly.
It doesn’t look like anything is going to change in the way dealers view their customers and customers view their dealers. Considering how, with the internet, customers these days are able to be more informed and confident about their purchases and what they can get, it will probably just get worse. And knowing how they feel about you is just one more reason to not trust your car salesperson. The only thing you should trust is your information.
Cheers,
Fashun Guadarrama.