A sucker walks into a new car dealership every minute. Dealership showroom floors are practically delivery rooms for freshly-born suckers. There are shiny new cars on the floor, and rapacious young sales professionals just waiting to lure you into something you can’t afford, don’t need, or otherwise shouldn’t own. I’ve seen them work their Jedi mind tricks, pushing customers upmarket, beyond budgets, and into longer and worse finance deals. It’s a borderline evil practice, and only the most sociopathic actors in society find employment as car salespeople. But this one takes the fucking cake.
If you’re cruising Reddit, I recommend checking out r/justrolledintotheshop. It’s the place where mechanics publicly post the worst examples of cars they have to work on. On Monday reddit user Nicetrydicklips authored a post titled “Customer left the finance paperwork for a new Kia in the glovebox.” The post was simply an image of the Truth-In-Lending disclosure for a brand new 2024 Kia EV9, and the numbers typed on it are truly bonkers.
The customer appears to have agreed to finance the new electric Kia SUV for 84 months at an interest rate of 10.65 percent. Under the “Amount Financed” segment, the dealer has written $107,065.42. It isn’t clear how they arrived at that price, as a fully loaded EV9 GT Line with all of the available option boxes ticked maxes out at $81,450. Whether the dealer is charging a $25,000 markup, or the customer had a trade-in they were rolling negative equity from into the deal, that’s a whole lot of cheddar for the car.
Given the customer’s qualified interest rate, the fact that they put zero dollars down on this car, and the exorbitant amount financed, they’ll have paid a total of $45,252.62 just in interest. That’s more than the MSRP of a base model Kia EV6! When all is said and done, seven years of $1,813.31 monthly payments will add up to a $152,318.04 Kia EV9.
That’s rough, buddy.
