GM's press release begins with a rhetorical question: "What would happen if you turned more than 20 undercover film and surveillance professionals loose to show the potential drawbacks of buying a used vehicle that is not manufacturer certified?" And then, without a trace of irony, "the results were not at all surprising." The General dispatched actors posing as car buyers– complete with hidden cameras and release forms– to "ambush" [their words] and embarrass [ours] private sellers with "questions that private party used-vehicle sellers often don't want to hear." During one close encounter of the heinous kind, the actor asks an unsuspecting seller if he can install a phone in the seller's home so he can call for roadside assistance any time, day or night. Other private sellers were harassed about "things like financing and courtesy transportation." "We even bought one of the cars and then tried to return it a few days later with a three-day, 150-mile guarantee," bragged copywriter Jim Hagar.
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What a pile of ****. I suppose that there are “low information car buyers” analogous to the low information voters one hears about. You would have to be seriously ill informed to fall for this line of crap.
I call shenanigans. This is the current trend in advertising and is almost always faked (Hardee’s “fancy restaurant”; Burger King’s “no more whopper”)
Expect YouTube parodies of this dreck to appear shortly. Can we put together a list of absurd questions you’d like to ask a dealer while accompanied by a hidden camera?
I would love to see season 2 of the same show, when owners of certified used GM cars try to get GM to actually honor their promises without weaseling out of them.
Ep 1: Roadside Assistance. The owner is left stranded and finds out that roadside assistance means they have 48 hours to respond, and only with in 10 miles of your home.
Ep 2: Drivetrain Warranty: The owner, with a broken tranny, discovers that GM won’t cover the repairs because they consider it normal wear and tear.
Ep 3: Finance: The owner is told he qualifies for their special zero APR finance deal. So they take the car home, and is then called back 2 days later and told the financing fell through and they have to take their 19% APR car loan.
Ep 4: BK – The owner discovers that GM themselves doesn’t actually provide any of the services and warranties. Instead, the sold them contracts with other companies who have since closed their doors and won’t honer anything. GM says Tough S**t to owners who complain.
I’m shocked. If that happened to me and I found out about it, you can be sure that I would not be buying a GM product after selling my car. And just when I thought they couldn’t get any more pathetic.
So let me get this… GM has now decided to pick on the little guy? Really, how low can you go GM!
GM’s corporate brainstems should use these tactics against some of their more worthless dealers.
Exactly! Bring a hidden camera into any car showroom in America to see the truly shocking. At least with a private sale you don’t have to go through that full-body disinfectant bath required when dealing with a “Stealer.”
–chuck
“Damn customers are biting into our margins, let’s go get’em!”
And they wonder why people warn their friends not to buy GM vehicles.
I just had to log back in (why, I don’t know) when I read yankinwaoz’s comment. Says it all. Once you’ve bought the vehicle you are no longer a customer. You are the enemy. And they will find a way to beat you.
Were they trying to find new ways to piss of the consumer? As someone who has bought several private party used cars and two new cars, the private party buying experience was much more pleasant and less adversarial. As an added bonus, with a private party sale, I get to meet the prior owner adn get a feel for how they drove the vehicle. Typically, they aren’t as good at lieing as a dealer either as they don’t get as much practice. There’s a reason a lot of people refer to them as “stealerships”.
One more dirty trick to add to the list above. The salesman takes your driver’s license to photocopy it before you can test drive the vehicle, then they somehow lose it. While they are “looking” for it, you are trapped at the dealer while they “work the numbers” one more time. There are some good dealers and salesman out there, but they are outnumbered by the slime balls. When looking for a used car, you won’t get me anywhere near a dealership.
One more manifestation of a corporate culture that sees its customer base as mostly composed of idiots. Hey GM, those little people you’re embarassing on camera bought their cars from you!
I can’t believe GM actually spent money to harass private sellers, the sellers must be actors too. I had a would-be buyer ask me if I could finance the car, I told them to go to a bank because I’m not a shady used car dealer. Nobody likes to have a jackass buyer ask them dumb questions, so I call BS on this.
Either way, kudos to GM for blowing through more cash for no good reason.
I will take “Really bad PR moves” for $800, Alex…
What is the take home message to this advertisement… don’t buy a used GM car? Sounds like a sure-fire way to make GM cars depreciate even faster than they already do.
I believe NickR has suggested a worthy QOTD.
What bastards. This makes me viscerally FURIOUS.
But I’ve already sworn off GM for life. I can’t do any more than that!
Aaah, maybe there IS a solution. I have to get married and keep my wife from buying GM. There are TWO fewer drivers for those vultures…
And then our children. No GM cars for them, either. If a boyfriend or girlfriend drives a GM, my son or daughter will just have to dump that person because of their mental and fiscal inferiority!
I can see it now. Me standing in the driveway in my plaid shorts, black socks, and sandals (no shirt), watering the roses and yelling at the top of my lungs:
“AS LONG AS I PAY FOR THIS DRIVEWAY, THERE WILL BE NO GM CARS PARKED IN IT!”
Although I can feel myself becoming my dad, I am a bit calmer now. Still furious, but better…
Stein X Leikanger Says:
“Damn customers are biting into our margins, let’s go get’em!”
And they wonder why people warn their friends not to buy GM vehicles.
Oh yes oh yes oh yes I do, and very vocally, too!
Toyota, BMW, Lexus and Honda all sell certified used vehicles. All have idiotic pitches, and suppositions if THEIR vehicle isn’t purchased. At least in AZ they do.
Why is everyone getting their panties in a bunch over this?
We even have a cornball Toyota dealership with a cheezy “Pirate Ship” and a fake “Cobblestons Main Street.”
Another glaring example of how the guys at the top of the Detroit 2.? are insulated from reality – how can it not be that no-one reviewing this at decision time didn’t say “hey – won’t that p*$s off the people who have our cars and want to sell them, you know, maybe to buy another?” Or do they realise that no-one suffering current ownership is going to keep repeating the mistake so they’ve said “f^%k it, let’s join the youtube generation and embarrass so people”.
I had some hope that Rick & the gang were merely incompetent and all that was needed was regime change – but this tells me they want their place in the history books for how to wreck what was a great organisation. Mind you – it could just be the thing for the other 1.? to use against GM, maybe on the lines of “we value our customer, what ever the age of our product they have” – they may not mean it, but it could sound sincere.
monkeyboy:
The key here is that those other manufacturers aren’t trying to make private sellers look like idiots. At a point where it would behoove GM to engender some goodwill they are coming off as absolute douchebags here.
If GM were assailing fly-by-night used car dealerships to promote CPO sales at their own dealers that would be one thing. They deliberately went after the little guy here. That would be the same little guy who you’d traditionally like to get to come buy one of your vehicles, btw.
That is the single dumbest thing that GM has done to date. For this PR disaster alone Rick W. and minimum Bob should be fired by the board of directors, had said board not consisted mostly of their cronies.
Bancho Says to monkeyboy:
The key here is that those other manufacturers aren’t trying to make private sellers look like idiots.
Not just idiots. GM is trying to make PRIVATE SELLERS look at best like unethical people, or at worst like lawbreakers!
When no such evidence or proof exists, don’t we call this slander?
What “plank” came up with this idea.
The fellow who buys the white truck only to return it a few days later because whoever doesn’t like it. The truck was a GM product?
Ironic. Sad, sad,sad.
monkeyboy Says:
July 25th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Toyota, BMW, Lexus and Honda all sell certified used vehicles. All have idiotic pitches, and suppositions if THEIR vehicle isn’t purchased. At least in AZ they do.
Why is everyone getting their panties in a bunch over this?
Maybe because they aren’t putting down the people who bought their cars and are now trying to sell them to someone else.
“We even bought one of the cars and then tried to return it a few days later with a three-day, 150-mile guarantee,” bragged copywriter Jim Hagar.
I wonder if the check cleared …
I hope the seller of the white ’03 Sierra at least had the sense to get that smarmy little sh*t to sign and date some kind of basic contract that included an “as-is” clause in it.
No, it’s not an ironclad legal document but it’s a lot better than a handshake and verbal agreement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_is
This just fuels my belief that GM is a disreputable company.
This is no different than the “market research” interviews that Ford ran for a while, where competitive users extolled the virtues of Edges, Focii, etc.
Cheesy and stupid. I’ve worked at ad agencies, and believe me, creativity is in damn short supply at most of these places. Worse, since the majority of account teams are twenty-somethings (you’d be lucky to have 1 -2 thirty-somethings, and 1 40-something as account supervisor on a team) — they have a pretty juvenile sense of what works — that too often shows little maturity.
BTW — I hate the GM-CPO ads on ebaymotors. It really screws up the whole works — when (for some makes) a large majority of the ads are dealer-cpo vehicles. Those are not auctions — ugh.
Reading TTAC I get at least one “laugh out loud” every day.
Do you have an email address for GM’s ad agency? I want to thank them for being so stupid that I got a really great laugh today.
Sounds like a poor man’s “Candid Camera” remake. Some gimmicks just dont work and this one sucks
I am “THIS CLOSE” to going to a GM dealership today to see if I can scuttle a deal in the most sly, underhanded way.
Just one. But a big one; maybe a Cadillac or a Corvette. Just to see if I can do it… Who’s with me? I’ll need an undercover cameraman!
For Canada anyway I actually READ the fine print for GM Optimum vs Honda Certifed vs Toyota Certified (Honda’s was the most comprehensive at the time). When I asked the GM dealer about this, I was informed I could purchase an extended warranty. That equated to getting less (a lot less) for more. Oh, for those keeping score, Toyota actually got the sale in the end.
ZoomZoom,
Two wrongs don’t make a right. If you are actually serious about your idea, at least make sure that you are doing it at a lousy dealer. I have actually done business with dealers that were good folks. And by that, I mean actually good, not just good compared to other dealers.
Is this supposed to be like those commercials where all of the NYC restaurant patrons were fooled into thinking they had real pasta, but instead were eating pasta from Pizza Hut?
I thought about getting angry over the idea of some cpo rep ‘ambushing’ a car sale, but then again, I’ve dealt with worse. Lowballers, folks who leave underhanded comments to the effect that I’m smoking something if I think my car will sell at the price I was asking for, vultures who circle around waiting for me to get frustrated part it out…
Personally, I think you people get too angry over the silliest things. If this was really happening, you’d hear stories about this on an internet forum, and not a press release.
But then again, if you believe these commercials to be actual events, then I suppose you also believe a VW Beetle with a heavy German accent flirted with two women in a dealership and talked them into buying a Jetta.
Lots of venom here and I’m not sure why?
If you want to spend more money for the warranty coverage you get with a Certified vehicle why not? If you don’t have enough bucks and want to take your chances go ahead….you get what you pay for.
If folks don’t understand what Certified offers, this seems like an interesting way to find out. The private sellers all seemed OK in the end. I’ll bet they all got paid, and all signed a release or they wouldn’t be on the site.
quasimondo Says:
Personally, I think you people get too angry over the silliest things. If this was really happening, you’d hear stories about this on an internet forum, and not a press release.
Yeah, maybe. I watched two of the ads. It was definitely bad TV. And you’re right, they probably paid the “sellers.”
But I most definitely would have wanted to slug the guy who accused the seller of lying because his arms were folded in front of him. And I wonder what, if anything, they were paid?
I hope it was worth what it cost; their human dignity.
But then again, if you believe these commercials to be actual events, then I suppose you also believe a VW Beetle with a heavy German accent flirted with two women in a dealership and talked them into buying a Jetta.
Now THAT I would like to see!