Question: no refund on uninstalled lojack?

You may wish to contact the Consumer Protection Unit of the California Attorney General's office:

OFFICE OF THE AG | PROGRAMS & SERVICES | CONSUMERS

 

I would argue that they didn't contact you to install the system in a reasonable amount of time, and you are therefore entitled to a refund. This may not be a legally defensible position, as you did commit to buying the lojack system. It is better to blame them for the situation (by stating that they didn't contact you about the item in a reasonable amount of time, and are therefore in breach of the contract) than to just say that you changed your mind. Your legal position might not be that important, though.

Dealers rely heavily on word of mouth advertising. Like any business, a single unhappy customer costs them a lot of money, because they have to spend more advertising dollars to combat the fact that you are telling your friends not to buy a car at that particular dealer.

The dealer will have to balance their actual losses against the bad will they generate by pursuing this. What are their losses, really? They might be stuck with a lojack unit they ordered... they'll probably be able to sell it to someone else soon enough, though... so their loss in minimal if they lose money at all.

One possible issue is that if they wrote the lojack costs into your loan payment, they might not be able to refund it in cash. If this is the case, you might be able to negotiate a dealer credit of some sort... maybe other dealer installed options or something... or even future oil changes. If they make a good faith offer to give you credit, consider it... you might want to meet them halfway rather than not at all. Don't take half a monetary refund... make sure whatever you get is of equal monetary value to the refund amount. Hey, you'll need to get the oil changed on it anyway... and those satellite radios are nice.

Years ago, I bought a Suzuki Sidekick, and purchased the Suzuki extended warranty through the dealer. On a long trip, one of the O rings on a cylinder broke, and I had to have the engine torn apart and rebuilt... cost me a ton of money. I'd had regular oil changes since buying the car, and the engine had about 50,000 miles on it at the time... the warranty covered it unti 70,000. The Suzuki dealer I took it to out of town felt that the O ring was likely factory flawed. Since I was out of town when the problem happened, I had to pay cash and submit the receipts for reimbursement. I called Suzuki Satisfaction Systems (who underwrote the warranty), sent all the paperwork, and was promptly turned down... they stated that O rings were normal wear and tear, and that the repair wouldn't be covered. They wouldn't budge. I asked them if they considered it normal that this part would fail (and the entire engine would fail) after 50,000 miles of normal use. They said yes.

I then took all my paperwork back to the original dealer that sold me the car, sat down with the service manager, and asked for his assistance getting reimbursement. He said that he couldn't do anything about it. I pointed out that they sold me the warranty, and that I felt they needed to back up what they sold. He shrugged it off and said he could do nothing about it. I thanked him, and walked out to my car.

I got my briefcase, got out the photocopied flyers I had prepared earlier, and began passing them out in front of the dealer. They said "Do Suzuki engines fail after 50,000 miles of normal use? Suzuki Satisfaction Systems says yes!" It then went on to tell the details of the story... how the out-of-state dealer felt it was a factory defect, how Suzuki Satisfaction Systems refused it... the whole story. I might have passed out 20 flyers when a well dressed gentleman came out of the dealer and asked me what I was doing. I told him the story, and he asked me to come into his office. Five minutes later, the service manger, me, and the well-dressed gentleman who happened to be the sales manager were in his office discussing the situation. Five minutes after that, and they were on the phone with Suzuki Satisfaction Systems getting me a check.

The moral of the story is that if something is affecting their sales, the dealer will jump all over fixing the problem. Discuss it with the sales manager. Make it clear to him that this issue is stopping you from recommending the dealership to other people, and prompting you to tell people to avoid buying from the dealership. State that overall, you were happy with the sales experience, and that if this problem was fixed, you would highly recommend the dealership to others. Point out that it costs a dealership a lot of money to negate bad word-of-mouth, and that refunding a paltry $600 doesn't really cost them anything (they'll sell another lojack unit), and gets them so much because it makes you a happy customer.

You might want to throw in that you are a member of PriusChat.com, and mention that people often ask for recommendations about a particular dealer (and many users travel out of their areas to buy their vehicles from reputable out-of-state dealers). Mention that you haven't recommended them yet because of this particular issue.

Good luck, and let us know how things work out.

Dan

 

I have a slightly off topic add to this lojack thread.

When I picked up my car it had lojack installed, like I had requested. I did ask for the high end lojack (early retrieval) and they installed the normal one.

I explained to the salesman that I did not get what I ordered before driving away, and it took a few minutes to explain the details.

In short, the lojack rep came back out, took the other module out, and placed the high end system in. The dealer drove me to a nearby Chinese restaurant so I could kill the rest of my afternoon.

I picked up the tab for the food. A couple of hours extra wait was no big deal, since it took almost 11 months for delivery.