Stephen Manza

Review of Lindsay Ford

This was the worst dealer I interacted with during...

This was the worst dealer I interacted with during my recent purchase of a new car.

tl;dr: All they want is to sell you a car on their lot. They will pressure you and lie to make an immediate sale. They are not interested in taking the effort to get you the car they want. There are a ton of Ford dealers in the DC area - go to a different one.

The whole story:
My wife and I went in to check out a Fiesta ST. As this is the first new car either of us has had, we wanted one with very specific options. We called ahead to make sure they had the orange one with black racing stripes they listed on their website. They did and we arrived a half hour later. To get to the car, the salesman had us jaywalk across 6-lane Connecticut Ave to their storage lot across the street. The car was sitting in their gravel lot under a tree. It was dusty and there were a half dozen bird droppings on the paint. After the test drive we went inside and the high pressure sales tactics and lies started.

My wife and I decided we didn't want the racing stripes because they blocked too much of the paint. The first sales manager kept trying to get us to buy the car anyway. She even suggested we remove them using a heat gun and she would discount the cost of the stripes (she didn't suggest Lindsay Ford do it - she wanted us to do it). I told her I wasn't comfortable with this but she kept pushing this car anyway. I finally had to flat out tell her that I didn't want to point a heat gun at brand new paint and we didn't want this car, but we'd be interested in buying if they could get one that did match our desired options. A second sales manager told us that it was hard to find a molten orange one without the racing stripes since most orange Fiesta STs come with them. It turns out that was a lie as I checked the Ford website inventory search and of the 9 orange ones available within 200 miles, only theirs had the stripes. Eventually they started looking through the available models and found one at another dealer that had most of what we were looking for, but not everything. I then asked if we could order one from the factory. Sales manager number one told us that it would take 90 days to get and it would be a 2017 because they couldn't order for model year 2016. Because it was a 2017 we wouldn't be eligible for dealer incentives or 0% financing. This turned out to be a lie, as we just ordered a 2016 model from another dealer with the incentives. After we decided to pick up and leave, the salesman promised to see if they could get the one that almost fit our criteria and would call the next day with a price and availability. He never called. We didn't really mind as there was no way we were buying from Lindsay Ford.