4 years ago
A two-star rating suggests a not-so-great experien...
A two-star rating suggests a not-so-great experience and because that is quite low, especially in comparison to the many positive reviews that the dealership has, it behooves me that I explain my rating. These were a couple of reasons why I rated them two stars based on my in-person experience on 1/23/2019. The first reason is that although they are somewhat far from a highway, it only makes sense to let customers experience a car fully by taking it to a highway and seeing what the pickup is, how easy it is to pass cars, etc. In my case until I prompted my salesperson, he wasn't keen on me taking the car to the highway and accordingly for the first car I tried, I just test drove on the back roads of Ardmore. That hardly seems like the right way to try a car out.
The second reason for my low rating was the price of the car itself that I went in to see. It was considerably higher than it needed to be and lo and behold, in a few days after I had seen the car, they did lower prices on it by $1000. (Factcheck: As of 2/28/2019, the car is still listed on their website and CarGurus tells me that it has been on their site for 196 days. No wonder why.) Moreover (and this is an issue with two other dealerships as well) INFINITI of Ardmore tacks on a $895 dealer prep fee "in order to recoup their costs of making the car ready for sale". What baloney! Dealers incur lots of costs in making a car ready for sale and all of that ought to go into the posted price. E.g. I had three cups of coffee while I was there at the dealership. Are they going to tack that onto the price of each car they sell as "customer service fee"? Customers take cars for a test drive and that (necessarily) uses gas. Is there supposed to be a $5 "fuel surcharge" to deal with that? My point is that other than taxes and regulatory fees which are outside the purview of any dealership, all other costs should be a part of the posted price or else I as a informed customer simply think the dealership is being less than perfectly honest with the customer.
Besides the issue with the price of the car and the unseemly $895 dealer prep fee, I was also disappointed to see them offer me less than $1100 for my trade-in, a 2006 Honda Accord with less than 123000 miles on it, in the highest trim with a v6 engine. To add insult to injury, I noticed that they had a very similar 2006 Accord on sale on their own website for over $6000, a nice markup!
Finally, I would say that the manager's attempt to make a hard sell at the end of our test-drive was unnecessary and is exactly the kind of thing which makes people wary of going into car dealerships. I told my salesperson that this was only the second day I had been test driving and I was quite far from reaching a decision. I am unsure if the manager was unable to read that, or if she chose to try the hard sell in spite of that fact. Making matters more interesting, she tacked on a $2000 additional warranty coverage to land up with a final number that was just north of $40 grand. Now that's some cheek: trying to sell someone a car at $40 grand on their second day of test driving and pretending as if this is somehow a great deal for the customer. So all in all, while I did not experience any rude salesperson or manager (the people were uniformly polite and friendly) I cannot recommend the dealership very highly and would be unlikely to come here again for purchasing a car. Perhaps for a test drive but only I can manage to actually drive the car on the highway!!!