In an unprecedented move that has sent chills down the white-belted spines of American car dealers, General Motors has declared nearly 1,000 of its 4,355 US retailers as “unfit and downright dangerous” to its customers and will be recalled immediately.
GM Vice-President of Franchise Dealer Relations Bentley Reuss said in a news conference in Detroit today that the manufacturer was, “equally concerned about our customers’ emotional and mental well-being as we were with their physical health when we did the ignition recall. When GM dealers berate car buyers, throw the keys to the their trades on the roof and fail to disclose products like Lifetime Tire Nitrogen on their contracts, it hurts our mutual clients.”
Reuss noted that an independent survey of recent buyers of GM products identified 988 dealers who handled the sales process poorly. Reuss was quick to point out this was not a termination of the affected retailers’ dealer agreements as that would be prohibited by state auto dealers franchise laws. “We had a ton of our recall lawyers about to bolt to Takata,” said Reuss. “We put them to work reviewing the state laws and they found there was nothing prohibiting a manufacturer from recalling a dealer when customer’s mental health was put in danger by a dealer.”
When asked about why this groundbreaking action was taken, in spite of the company’s excellent showing in the recent J. D. Power Sales Satisfaction survey, Reuss laughed and said, “You mean J.D. Monopoly? We and our dealers control that survey 100%. Let’s just say that it is amazing what free oil changes can do. We did our own independent survey which yielded accurate results.”
Reuss admitted that the dealer abuse of car buyers had been going on “for some time” but that GM senior management was never told about it until earlier this year and that the person in charge of customer satisfaction initiatives has been fired.
Reaction from the recalled dealers was predictable. Said David White, owner of Brandywine Chevrolet in suburban Philadelphia, “Its ironic that when business is bad, GM wants you to move the iron at any cost, customer satisfaction be damned. We’ve sold a ton of cars for Chevy and this is the thanks we get. The funny thing is that our local GM factory guy was in my office when the announcement came out and he was not told about it. It didn’t stop him from trying to sell us some of those crappy Volts, though.”
Recalled dealers’ inventory will be shipped to the nearest same-franchise dealership, with the exception of the Corvette which will be redistributed at “the local Zone Manager’s discretion,” said Reuss.
Reuss noted that their review also uncovered 28 Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Saab stores still in operation despite the elimination of those franchises in the late 2000’s. Those retailers will be terminated rather than recalled. “Those dealerships were actually showing great customer satisfaction numbers so we are sad to see them go. Again,” said Reuss.
Tesla stock rose on the GM recall news, though founder Elon Musk said, “There goes our plans to partner with Cadillac next year to sell our cars.”
If you couldn’t already tell, this is a satirical article. -Ed.
Leftover April Fool’s piece? Gimme a turkey sandwich.
Excellent article. Missing only a four square reference !
Dang it…you are correct!
Well, as long as we’re making up Tall Stories, I just read this over on the Wall Street Cheat Sheet
“Did you miss the Ford Ranger? You know, Ford’s smaller pickup truck that gave companies like Nissan and Toyota a run for their money? Well, it’s coming back, and has new suit that’s already familiar to some international markets. It may be in response to GM’s reintroduction of the Chevy Colorado and GMC Canyon, or perhaps customers just missed it. Either way, the Ranger is ready to take on the 21st century with a redesign and expanded capabilities. America loves trucks, and it also loves fuel efficiency. Just imagine what the combination of a smaller, more nimble pickup combined with Ford’s EcoBoost technology could bring the market.”
Read more: http://wallstcheatsheet.com/automobiles/auto-business/6-potential-model-reintroductions-for-2016-to-be-excited-about.html/?a=viewall#ixzz3KGU15rfL
Oh, wait, it’s true
It’s just not happening. True it’s bonafide rumour, but Ford’s been there. Done that. Bought the T-shirt. Threw up all over it. Said “Jane, Stop this Crazy Thing!!!!”
They’re not into having the F-150 cannibalize the Ranger in its overseas markets, nor vice versa. Each truck has its place and placement. That’s a disappointment to truck enthusiasts on both ends.
But here’s the CarAdvice interview with Ford global marketing’s Raj Nair:
Pushed on why under the company’s ‘One Ford’ policy – which emphasis a global strategy in product manufacturing – the F-150 isn’t made available in right-hand drive, Nair said the Ranger is the chosen truck for the rest of the world and not the F-150.
“The F-150 is a great solution for here [North America] and the Ranger is a great solution for the rest of the world. The Ranger isn’t a compact truck for the rest of the world, it’s *the* truck for the rest of the world.”
Conversely, he noted that the Australian-designed and -engineered Ford Ranger wouldn’t work in the North American market where customers demanded larger vehicles.
caradvice.com.au/266622/ford-f150-wanted-australia/
Am I on the Onion News Network? Or is this April 1st?
There’s so much BS floating around in this it’s hard to tell what’s really going on, but I’m sure we’ll know soon
“equally concerned about our customers’ emotional and mental well-being”
Please, and the Cimarron was really a Cadillac and a good car
It seems GM has bad relationships with everybody.Their customers,parts suppliers,their own dealers (currently being sued by the Canadian ones),the government.Good thing the shareholders have no quarrels yet.
I won’t believe it until the local-to-me Chevrolet dealership is empty of new Chevies.
I want to see the list, because there are a couple of dealers if who’s names don’t show-up I’ll know this is a crock
You don’t know already?
I was just trying to play along, you know, like with the other stories that are a crock
Um…ok…
Happy shenanigans day?
Wow, this is so weird. I googled the title to this story and TTAC is the only thing that came-up.
988 GM dealers closed…in 2008.
The coincidence is remarkable, isn’t it? I mean what are the chances?
One other hit came up, it was right under “Batboy Marries Lindsey Lohan” and “Is Saturn a UFO?!?”
If it’s real, I want to know where those Oldsmobile dealers are. Maybe I can still get a buy on a leftover 1987 Cutlass 442?
I’d pay sticker
1968 red w/white interior 4-4-2 hardtop coupe for me! I’ll wait…
I wonder if “Elephant Engine Ernie” is old enough to retire yet?
I’m not sure what’s funnier – this shaggy dog story or the fact that some of your readers took it seriously!
Steve must have the wrong calendar, its not April 1, its November 26.
Lets see about these recalls, how do you tow a dealer? How do you put a dealer up on a hoist to fix it?
Maybe November 26th is Canadian April Fool’s Day.
I blame the metric system.
Our April Fool’s day is the same as yours.
how about blaming the toxic corporate culture of that monolith known as GM???
I still wonder if we did anyone any favours by bailing them out.
“Elon Musk said, “There goes our plans to partner with Cadillac next year to sell our cars.”
I told you all Elon was making a move to Cadillac, but did you believe me? Nooooo
Now the clickbait accusers have some real ammo!
I was never big on the whole clickbait thing. Clickbait is usually giving the public what it wants. Since readers are a website’s consumer, giving them articles they want to read are satisfying that demand. This is just wrong. When fiction was previously done on this site, it was always listed as such. This was presented as a normal article. You start reading and find out it’s completely stupid and has no factual value. It was just a blatant attempt at getting a click. Hey TTAC people, if you don’t want readers to accuse you of publishing clickbait, don’t publish crap like this.
Very much agree. Should have been clearly marked like the Sunday Stories were. I would have read it in a lighter tone, and not been annoyed when I was finished. The headline looks very serious, it is indeed click bait.
At least it’s about dealerships that almost no one here was planning on visiting.
Yeah, thank God it wasn’t Mitsubishi
True, I’d have been crushed. Thanks for worrying about me.
I do, was-up wit you today?
Blaming the dealers is a cop out, especially cons!dering the crap products the dealers have to work with.
A better solution would be for GM to improve their products.
Hasn’t happened. Not happening now. Ain’t gonna happen ever.
Yeah you can’t blame GM when people keep buying their crappy cars. And not just fleet. Where is Caroline anyways? Another problem is pickups and SUVs. Fullsize especially. The profits from the Silverado alone exceeds the GNP of banana republics. All this rewards bad behavior.
It’s easy to offer massive discounts when you have a $8K – $10K per truck profit margin to work with.
The penultimate paragraph is the best paragraph. Well done!
WTF is this?
Was this stuck in the Spam filter since April 1st?
XD
nice
GM should have insisted that all their dealers adopt the Saturn model for a pleasant, customer friendly store and they would not be having these issues now.
Just GM doing a little blame shifting.
Piss on customers. When caught doing such, piss on dealers.
Hey!! Alright!!
Everytime I heard “what will it take to get you to buy this car today” it drove me a little bit more crazier.
Yes I don’t get it. If not eliminating franchise agreements then what is it?
John
John, it has been a long-held belief that there are too many GM dealers in the US. This causes competition for sales between local dealerships, heavy discounting, reduced dealer profits, etc.
Sales managers often are really hardpressed to give a potential buyer a solid bottom-line price for fear that they may walk and take that offer elsewhere as bargaining leverage.
The name of the game among local GM dealers is to take the sale away from another dealer, often by undercutting price or offering more “freebies”.
It was that way for the decades that my brothers were GM dealers, and I’m reasonably certain it continues today.
Closing down 988 of them, if that were to actually happen after the lawsuits and other litigation that will take a lot of time to settle, reduces the number of GM dealerships by more than 20%. Sounds good to the ones remaining open!
What struck me more than anything else was the comment by Mark Reuss, “in spite of the company’s excellent showing in the recent J. D. Power Sales Satisfaction survey, Reuss laughed and said, You mean J.D. Monopoly? We and our dealers control that survey 100%. Let’s just say that it is amazing what free oil changes can do. We did our own independent survey which yielded accurate results.”
I know this to be true! When a GMC/Buick sale was hanging in the balance, my brothers would offer a written rider to the sales contract specifying free oil and filter changes every 7500 miles for 2, 3 or even 4 years, but never longer than the factory warranty period.
I understand this is a satirical article, but even in this spirit, the article hits home with a lot of dealers who are fighting among themselves for their cut of local markets.
I appreciate satire & irony as much as anybody- really I do.
But out of context (i.e., April 1), this doesn’t make any sense to me. And while I suspect the regulars got it post-haste, I suspect that many a casual reader or google-directed first timer will have no reason to suspect it a joke, and frankly I don’t see how that does the TTAC brand any favors…
An explanation would be welcome.
Critical thinking and reading comprehension are skills needed to survive in the modern world – or, in some cases, to support those without said skills in the modern world.
Your choices are: sink, swim, crawl upon the back of someone who can swim.
An impressive display by the “best and brightest”.
My local Chevrolet dealership should be shut down for thinking they could sell a $60,000+ V6 Silverado.
The Ford dealer near me has a 2014 (not 2015) Mustang convertible for $9K off sticker to “move it out” @ $63,000 or $250 MORE then I paid for my first house
Doesn’t matter that this is humor, no GM car will ever disgrace my garage again.
Although, d*mn, that C7 vette would have been on my special order list.
Yes, it’s a parody. Unfortunately.
A parody… like GM! Top work! Let’s give them more of our money!!
Satire, irony yes. Parody, no.
Thank you from the pedantry department.
No.. Thank YOU. Matter of opinion.. GM is an easy target.
I agree with Halftruth, GM is an easy target!
However, most recently, the faulty ignition switch recall took many years to ferment and implement so I wonder what awaits the people who buy GM cars today, in a few years.
Just because GM was brought back from the dead with taxpayer money doesn’t mean that people killed driving badly engineered GM cars can be brought back from the dead.
Badly engineered, researched and developed is the same back in the ’70s, 80’s and 90’s as it is in 2000’s and 2010’s.
Look at Ford! There’s a sterling example of a company gone great!
The article is satire or irony. The subject of the article, GM, could be said to be a parody of a car company. But it seems pretty clear to me that when halftruth said [it] was a parody, just like GM, the it was the article, not the subject of the article. The article is satire, not a parody.
If the author had taken a real article and parodied it (say, by changing some words to make a serious article funny) then [it] would be a parody.
As I said, pedantic.
Welcome back to TTAC, Mr. Lang.
Or is that a joke, too?
*facepalm*
facepalm
And the point of this was? I thought this was the “truth” about cars? Guess it was a slow news days.
To paraphrase Police Captain Louis Renault: “Shocked! Shocked, I am, to find there are questionable sales practices going on at automobile dealerships!”.
Was TTAC hacked by Robert Farago?
Farago expressed strong opinions, mostly based on the inherent weakness on GM’s business at the time.
This is a rather feeble, ham handed attempt at satire. Farago probaly would have hit the delete button when this came on his screen.
If you are going to have a contributor with the initials of SL, please bring back the original
Yes, whoever is in charge, cannot you not make amends with the great and sorely missed Steven Lang? Please.
LOL! I was wondering who had the balls to do that. Great story!
The article & pictures remind me of my local Chevrolet dealership, the only difference being there are cars on the lots and vultures on the light posts. The local funeral home has more customers.
I don’t understand this, but some dealers leave their signs up when brand is discontinued.
We have a Chrysler/Dodge/Plymouth/Eagle dealer in the area, apparently.
It probably serves as an invitation for owners of defunct brands that are looking for service and can be encouraged to buy from a surviving brand the dealer still offers. I doubt there are enough Eagles still in circulation for this to be a grand strategy though.
When did TTAC become the Onion?
Beginning to understand why I only come back here quite infrequently.
shifterbrains, at least you come back. So many have not.
Completely and wholly irresponsible schtick masquerading as humour / journalism.
For almost a decade TTAC was my go to place for automotive straight talk.
Robert cut new territory with the deathwatch series. Called a spade a spade with the flying vagina. Jack led the way too.
But this. This. This is the end of TTAC. It has now officially jumped the shark. Vertical Scope. Cut your losses and let this once honourable place die with some dignity. Not through this disservice to humanity.
Some of you are being just a weeeeeeee bit melodramatic.
What I find most interesting about articles like this is that my worst dealer experiences by FAR were at VW and Honda stores, with a Dodge place coming a close third.
And, unlike this article, my experiences were quite real!
Strangely true that my own worst experience was at a VW dealer followed by a Honda dealer.