John Eagle Sport City Toyota Scion
When I was looking for my last car, I was drawn to Scion for its pure price policy and their incentives for graduate students. Sadly, a major flaw with the aforementioned incentives is that if you are making the salary of a grad student--you aren't likely to qualify.
As for Sport City's role. I picked a car, was given a nice demo by the salesman, and got a test drive no hassle. Upon becoming more serious about buying the car, the salesman went ahead and did a credit check and application. Credit was 100% clean, but the grad financing got denied. Based on my good credit and income, I was told that my loan would definitely not have interest over 6%. I was also told the out-the-door cost of the vehicle. We returned the next day with all of the documents required to verify our finances, at which time after dropping the paperwork with the financing agent, we were informed our interest rate would be 10%. I had planned to pay off the car in a 6 month span...so even though I was bothered by the change, I didn't back out at this point.
By the time I got out of the waiting room and to the financing agent's desk, the interest rate of the car had risen to 14.99%, and the purchase price had risen by $2800 (because they tacked on the loan protections reserved for those with bad credit, as well as unwanted service-related packages). I informed the agent of the price I was offered by the salesman, and the interest rate. Suddenly my credit record was no longer perfect (they found a late payment for the Celica my dad bought for me in my name five years prior as a HS graduation gift).
I informed the salesman that I would tolerate the interest increase, but not the near $3000 increase in the buying price. For the next hour he pulled out his little board and did math to try and make a deal with me. He apparently assumed I couldn't add, because every time a concession was made, something else would get more expensive--and the overall buying price would not decrease. The next hour was him trying to convince me it'd be OK to buy the car and refinance in a year.
Apparently he missed the point about how I intended to pay it off in less than a year. He also failed to recognize the fact that if I pay $3000 over the MSRP+TTL, etc, no amount of refinancing is going to get me an even remotely fair deal.
On top of the issues dealing with the price, the agent was pretty rude. It's one thing to negotiate, it's another to verbally imply a customer is stupid each time they reject an offer. Also, by making multiple offers that did not decrease the interest or buying price, despite my clear assertion that I would not buy the car unless the purchase price decreased, he showed that he was either excellent at ignoring me, or was attempting to trick me. In either case, that's not cool.
Overall, I was super disappointed. A couple weeks later I went to another dealer (that I won't mention because I don't want this review confused with an ad for a competing dealer) and actually managed to buy the car for it's actual out-the-door price with an acceptable interest rate. Sport City Scions bait-and-switch pricing and financing totally ruins Scion's Pure Price policy.