This is the story of how one company, Chrysler Canada, has lost a customer forever. And with any luck they will lose you, dear reader, as well.
I leased my first ever new vehicle in 2002, a beautiful yellow Mazda Protégé 5. Oh! How wonderful it was! Quick! Versatile! Fun! And it had a 5 speed standard. I was in bliss! 3 months after I leased it I met my wife-to-be. She couldn’t drive standard.
A year after we got married I started a new job much closer to home and I could drive our toy car, an old Volkswagen Beetle. The wife (no names, I am so very scared Kinsella might try to track me down!) needed a better vehicle for her commute. And so the tale of woe began. We went to the local 5-star Jeep dealership and worked out a deal to lease a Liberty. Wifey liked it and I was strangely willing to get rumped by these guys in order to make her happy. The original price “fell through” when the 0% wasn’t available and we were jacked-up an extra $25 a month, but I accepted it because the Jeep made her comfortable traveling all over town to strange, new places. Deal done, we left, leaving the beautiful Mazda behind.
The deal with the Mazda was that Chrysler would buy it out. It was a very popular car then and almost impossible to find a used one in that colour. They called Mazda and got the lease buy-out and worked the deal based on that figure. They also promised to cancel my insurance once the buy-out was complete. They didn’t do either.
A couple of weeks after signing the deal I noticed ICBC had taken my insurance payment for the Mazda. I phoned the dealership to see why my insurance hadn’t been canceled. A week after that I got a call from Mazda Financial asking why I hadn’t made my lease payment. Again I called the dealership. I didn’t get a response on either call but a few days and then I did get a message that the dealership needed to talk to me urgently. It wasn’t about my problems, I found.
They discovered they had made a $600 error on the lease buy out and wanted me to make good on it. They weren’t at all interested in the $150 insurance payment I was out or the damage to my credit from missing a lease payment. Well, we had a deal and we agreed to stick to it, I ate the $150 and they ate the $600. Really, what else could they do?
And so, seeing how bad their “5-Star” service really was, I carried on with the lease with a bit of apprehension. But the Liberty was a great truck. It was reliable, fun, safe, everything we wanted. We drove it for four years and were really torn when it came time to return it. We had used 30,000 fewer Ks than the lease allowed and it was immaculate in and out but we had an adoption to spend our money on, a very expensive adoption.
We said goodbye to the Jeep. The dealer took it back and their inspections mentioned no problems with the vehicle. We thought we had moved on and only a week earlier we received a referral for a 4-year old boy from Taiwan. Everything was going so well! Then we received the letters from Chrysler Canada. The first was a notice that they had “lost” our personal information during shipping and they sincerely hoped we didn’t have our identity stolen and our credit ruined. The second was a demand letter for $4000 for “excess wear and tear”. The invoice didn’t detail what that “excess wear and tear” was. I phoned my brother, the car salesman, and he laughed and laughed as he told me how Chrysler and it North American compatriots do business. This, he said, was a scare tactic and soon we’ll receive a phone call telling us that Chrysler will “forgive” the debt if we just lease another vehicle. He’s seen it a hundred times.
What began as a horror story on dealership ethics has ended as a horror story on the culture of North American car manufacture and sales. Aside for the fact that Fords are badly designed, ugly things and GM hasn’t made an interesting car in 30 years, it seems that the concept of customer service and building brand loyalty are foreign to these domestics. I won’t buy a Ford just to save some guy’s job in Oshawa. I want value for my hard-earned money, I want to buy a car because it is a well designed, quality built vehicle. I’ll even pay more for that. It seems to this consumer that, rather than emulate the Japanese, or Germans, the domestic companies would rather bully and trick their way into sales of what I can only see as inferior cars. Maybe if they built cars with the elegant designs of Audi or Mazda, domestic companies wouldn't have to resort to tricks and extortion to get buyers to re-up with them.
Well, this laddie is not for turning, to paraphrase Thatcher, and Chrysler can come see me in court if they really want their money. They can also kiss goodbye any future sales to my family. It's sad because we really like the new 4-door Jeep Renegade and believed Chrysler had some interesting cars, too. They should also know that I will tell everyone I can this little story, like I just did to you, and recommend you never do business with Chrysler Canada either. I think Mazda will be getting a few more sales from me in the future.
