Tom Gill Chevrolet

I would never recommend Tom Gill to anyone. Where to start? I had to deal with over a dozen different people just to complete the process of buying a car. Almost none of them were competent and none of them apparently ever communicated with each other. Okay, so you go in, tell them what you want and they walk you through this presentation where they repeatedly tell you several themes. Among those themes, "this isn't a dealership where you have to negotiate" and "we take the stress and pressure out of car buying." Remember these themes, because they'll become important later. So I speak with my salesman (by the way, super nice guy, his name was Todd Weber) and eventually we settle on the kind of car I'm looking for. He pulls a car up, we do a test drive and so far everything is going swimmingly. We go back inside and we start talking about prices. My (used) car was priced at around $8.8k. I said that was more than I thought it was worth and I think $8.2k is a fair price. (Remember when they said negotiating wasn't part of their process?) Anyway, this was the first point when other people had to get involved. My salesperson had no authority to negotiate so we had to bring in a sales manager. And this woman was a piece of work. She starts berating me: (1)"Well the best I can do is $8.5k." (2)"You're being ridiculous, this is already a good deal." (3)"I can't believe you're getting hung up on a few hundred dollars." (4) "Well this deal is only good for today so you'll have to take it now or lose it." (Remember when they said they take the stress and pressure our of car buying?) Anyway, after I got up to walk to the door she finally acquiesced and gave it to me for the fair $8.2k price. So now we're talking about financing and this is where they bring in two other people to try and pressure me into making a bad deal. FYI: car rates are ridiculously low rate now, don't finance a car at over 2.5% even with bad credit. They wanted me to sign a deal for 10.2%. Again I went to walk and they pleaded and lied. (1)"Rates actually aren't that good right now." (2) "We can't control the rates, it's on the bank." Eventually as I walked out the door they said they would talk to their bosses (great, more people involved) and see what they could do. The next day I get a call back and low and behold "the bank" suddenly decided to give me a better rate and they were willing to close the deal. Great, I left work and drove to Florence (again) to trade in my old car and drive away with my new one. This visit was relatively pain-free, with the exception of when I was signing my paperwork. The guy (Mark Miller, I think) was giving me quick and fast descriptions of the documents I was supposedly signing. I don't know if he didn't expect me to read them or what but he was blatantly lying. The documents did not say at all what he purported them to be. When I called him out on the lies his excuse was, "oh well I'm new and this is just what they told me to say." Either way, not really the type of place I want to do business with. Eventually the papers get signed (after I add some clauses of my own and subtract some of their more egregious contractual clauses). The next day I’m driving my car to work, been off the lot for less than 12 hours, and a warning light comes on. My tire pressure monitor was going off. I called the dealership, and got a litany of excuses. (1) “Oh, it’s the weather.” (2) “You probably hit a big bump.” etc. I know how these tire pressure monitors work, after a few years they start to get finicky. You can reset them and the warning light goes away for a while but then comes back a few days later. Instead of replacing the faulty monitor they just reset it to sell it to me. Fantastic. So I go back to Florence (third time) and wait for my car to be fixed. Greg Hayes (yet, another person) assures me that it was just the weather and they’ll go and reset it. I wait for two hours. Greg Hayes comes back and tells me they can’t reset it and they don’t have anybody in the building who knows how to replace it. What? You’re a dealership with an allegedly fully functioning service center. Anyway Greg tells me to come back on a weekday and get it fixed. This was already my third time driving out to Florence to try and get a car, so I tried to explain to Greg was this was an unacceptable resolution. Greg agrees that it would be a hassle and promises that somebody will come pick my car up from me on Monday and take it to the dealership to get it fixed and drive it back. I agree as this solves my problems and Greg promises he’ll call on Monday to arrange everything. Monday comes and nobody calls. Eventually I call them and I am told they can’t do it Monday. They need to order parts first, they’ll call me when they have the parts. Wednesday comes and I still haven’t heard from them. At this point Greg tells me they can’t come pick it up (apparently lying is second nature to Tom Gill employees) but if I drop it off, they can give me a rental. So the next morning I go to drop my car off (fourth time in Florence) and I have to meet with two new people. The service manager and some service assistant. They eventually get me going on my way with a rental. Car gets fixed. I drop the rental off and pick up my car (fifth time in Florence). This time I ask Todd Weber where the second set of keys to my car are. He tells me there isn’t a second set. So I go home. Several days later Todd calls me. Turns out there was a second set and he tells me I can come pick them up. Uh, no. I wasn’t going to drive out to Florence for a sixth time because he lied to me the last time I was there. He can mail them. Todd agrees to mail them. Fast forward another week, I get a letter from Jane from titles. Inside the letter is a copy of my registration with a note that says, “if the license plate on this registration isn’t on your car, please call me.” Well considering I still had temp tags because the dealership hadn’t given me plates yet, I called Jane. She told me she would do some digging and get back to me. Apparently the dealership doesn’t have these plates either. So she literally picked a random plate number, registered my car with that number, and then cannot find any plates to match it. So the entire registration has to be redone. At this point I called Todd Weber and asked for another temp tag because mine were about to expire and Jane has to redo the title she screwed up. While I have him on the phone I ask him about the keys he supposedly mailed. He tells me he never mailed the keys and I should wait on my new plate. I again explain how Jane screwed up because apparently nobody there talks to each other. He then tells me to come pick up new tags. I tell him I’m not driving out to Florence for a sixth time because Tom Gill can’t get their stuff together. He then tells me he will get around to mailing my new temp tags next week. My tags expire next week, given Todd’s track record, I’m not optimistic. And here’s the point where I’m writing this. The saga of getting my car still isn’t over but it’s already way too long and way too full of the failures of Tom Gill Chevrolet.