Even when you get a deal on something at a dealer, they’ll still find a way to try and get some more money out of you to make up for the fact that you got said deal. Take how Hyundai covered an engine replacement for my car, but the dealer still said I needed to part with $800 for new hoses and belts. The main place things like this happen at dealerships is in the finance managers office. Going over those final contracts dealers will often try and sneak things in like extended warranty plans and gap insurance. Take a dealer that tried to sneak in $20,000 worth of extras on a customer.
This latest dealer grift comes to us by way of a tweet on X via friend of the site Zach Shefska of CarEdge and Ray & Zach on YouTube. In the tweet, Zach says that they recently helped a customer with a Lexus deal at Lexus of Englewood, New Jersey. Except when they got to the finance manager’s officer, they tried to throw on thousands of dollars in extras. Wanting a bit more info, I reached out to Zach for some more details.
He informed me that they helped the customer get their Lexus and negotiated $7,000 off sticker for the vehicle. Apparently, the dealer finance manager may not have liked that the customer got $7,000 off. Zach says they were informed of what the manager was trying to pull through a message from one of the guys working on the deal. “You gotta be kidding me,” read the message. Not long after the customer sent them over the vehicle contract.
As you can see, the total vehicle price is just over $90,000. Yet the manager tried adding on nearly $21,000 in bullshit extras. A near $9,000 extended warranty on top of a $5,000 maintenance contract, another $5,000 for “tire wheel and product,” more insurance from Toyota for $1,200 and most egregious of all, $1,240 for an “optional sales commission.”
Surprisingly, Zach says they were able to get all the extra crap removed and the deal moved forward. Personally, seeing that would have been a deal breaker for me and I would have torn up the contract and walked. I’m sure though whoever’s buying that Lexus is a better person than I am.
And what of the sales manager that tried to pull a fast one? I asked Zach does he know what happened to them, he said he’s not sure. I’d bet money though that nothing happened and that the person is still sitting pretty in their office.
This is all just another example of why it’s important for every single line of a car sales contract to be read. Dealers will hate you for it, and they’ll try to explain it away as “Mumbo jumbo. Just sign on the dotted line.” Yet things like these sorts of extras often get snuck in because people don’t fully review the contact. Oh, if only the government had some kind of rule they could enact that would stop this sort of thing.
