Garavel Subaru

After multiple dealings with Garavel we have concluded they are at best incompetent and at worst every vile thing you associate with a used car salesman. In 2013 we popped in to Garavel to ask a few questions, and wound up getting hard sold by Miles Shapiro with a "what do I have to do so you don't leave." We weren't ready to lease then but got the whole spiel about "end of model year clearance", "Subaru's a great car", etc. We wound up leasing an Impreza that day which we were to pick up the following week. Miles called a few days later saying the car we had leased had actually already been leased to someone else but Garavel would give us a similar car with a few extra bells and whistles for no extra charge (incompetence?). Not the end of the world, but my concern was our cost to buy out the car at the end of the lease would go up (Miles confirmed) and we didn't want that extra burden for bells and whistles we didn't need. I asked Miles to lower the down payment by $500 to factor that in and he refused. So I got another offer from a Subaru dealer in Manhattan for what I wanted to pay, called Miles, and forced him to give us the offer we wanted to take their other car. In 2016, when we went to lease our Forrester, Garavel was able to screw us not once, but twice. After five hours spent on back and forth on deal terms, trade in of old car, and test drive, we eventually settled on terms. However, when we went to move through financing, we were placed into yet another high pressure sales pitch with one Jose Marin who attempted to upsell us on service packages which would have tacked on hundreds of extra dollars per month to our just agreed upon lease terms. Unlike with our Impreza, where service was thrown in for free, standard, Garavel had since changed its policy but didn't bother to mention this until the very end. We walked out, and Miles needed to chase after us to convince us this was a mistake. Yet, again, we took the bait. Finally in 2019, while at CarMax trying to sell our end of lease Forester (near mint, <14k Miles), we were made aware that our buyout price from Chase would have put us underwater on that CarMax offer. Our official salesperson in 2016 was a guy named Gary Baumann who did the bulk of the paperwork as Miles was pulling the strings and leading the negotiations. While we were sitting face to face with Gary and he was writing us up, we distinctly remember asking the same critical question at least twice: "so Gary, the buyout price at the end of the lease is 57% of MSRP - like our Impreza?", to which Gary nodded and gave us a "yeah." You'd think an honest salesperson, if they weren't 100% sure, would stop and say: "great question, let me check that for you." Well, the answer we received turned out to be a "miscommunication" at best, and intentionally misleading at worst and that misrepresentation wound up amounting to a difference of ~$3,800, again, at our expense. The true buyout price (called "residual value", we didn't know that was the term until years later) on the lease document was actually 70% of MSRP, at the high end of the range for any 36-month lease for any car, according to subsequent research. We still don't see "% of MSRP" anywhere on that lease, even though those are the terms sales will use with you to discuss your lease buyout cost, if asked. After our recent discovery, I emailed everyone involved to explain the situation and demand remediation. Jeremy Garavel was responsive, showed us the 70% MSRP buyout wasn't incorrect, at least according to Chase and the standard terms for that model in that month, and offered us $500 to take a hike. However, he would not comment on the possibility of his salespeople making a mistake, or something more intentional. When we said we'd need $3k to walk away given the magnitude of the screw up and prior misdealings, Garavel withdrew his offer and told us to talk to their lawyer. As Jeremy claimed over email "we take our integrity and customer service record seriously." If you believe that, I've got some swampland in Florida to sell you.