Thanks for the responses. Here's the story.
My '04 Hyundai blew up -- timing belt went, had been replaced at proper interval @ 40k miles ago. So I've been searching for a new car.
I do a lot of internet searching and find the above-listed Camaro on 1/9/12. I took a screen cap to email to a buddy of mine. I just need a cheap beater to get to and from work -- wife has the mini-van for family stuff, this one is just a Beltway blaster for me.
Seems like a good price, so I go in. They tell me "we were just about to wholesale this. It's winter and no one has really looked at it." But it's there, on the lot, with an '02 in the windshield, waiting for me. It's dark so I decide I'll come back a couple of days later and test-drive it.
Get my credit pulled, am told I have excellent credit, fill out this app and we'll do a loan. I fill out the app. I have excellent credit, they tell me.
Take a test-drive. Everything goes splendid. Nothing broken, smokin', or chokin'. It's a 3.8L, bulletproof motor. Performs as you'd expect. Not peppy but it's a 6-cylinder. Everything's tight and nice.
"I'll take it. Do up the paperwork," says I. This is MLK day, this past Monday. When the banks are open, I need to move money around. They show me the price, and that they're only making like $40 on the deal. It's the lowest priced car on the lot -- by thousands.
Salesguy tells me "Oh, well, uh, we just have to run it through MSI, we didn't do that because it was winter and we figured no one would want it. Come in tomorrow afternoon and we'll do the paperwork."
Halfway through the following day, I get a call from the Used Car Manager. "Bad news about the car, buddy! Looks like it's gonna take $2000 to put it through MSI. Leaky seals and a bunch of stuff wrong with it. I'm not gonna sell it to you. Hey, since we know you wanted to get in a price range of $150/month, did you see anything else there that we could put you in for that payment?"
"A red Camaro, like was advertised, that I test-drove." I said. UCM hangs up.
I call Corporate. Get some lady who has the Customer Relations person get the GM involved. He calls me and tells me "I want to work a deal, blah blah." We go back and forth for the better part of this week -- first his tech has the inspection report locked in his toolbox and has left for the day, then he needs to talk it over with the service manager, etc. They give me a list of what the inspector found. Some of it is MSI-required, some of it is not.
I repeatedly and calmly tell him: "All I want is for you to inspect the car and sell it to me, like you implicitly promised by letting me waste time, effort, and points on my credit score, in preparation to buy."
Mysteriously during this time, the car has disappeared from the website completely.
He finally says he'll split the cost of MSI with me, and talk it over with his Service manager. Service manager calls me, tells me everything wrong with it again, and says "Yeah, I just did an estimate, now it's like $3,000 to fix, so we're just going to wholesale it." Wow. Just sitting there on the lot it sustained $1,000 in MSI required repairs?
I kinda feel like I was baited-and-switched, in an extreme way. If not, it was a combination of very lazy and poor customer service, if nothing else.
The fact that the UCM jumped right in trying to sell me something else for my monthly payment to try to make it about "payment, not purchase price," is what really tipped me off, in my mind. Sure, we can drag a 2010 Whatever out to 84 or 96 months and get it into a $150 a month range, but nothing else on that lot even APPROACHED the purchase price of that car.
Anything I can do, besides just drop it and buy somewhere else?
I was pretty upset about the whole thing. There aren't a lot of cars in my price range right now. Next-best thing I looked at was an '05 Buick with 77k miles for $10k. Not exactly a smokin' deal there.
