Heritage Toyota Catonsville

This is to formally state that we are unhappy with the overall purchasing experience at Russel Toyota dealership and the service department. Overall the purchasing experience raised significant concerns of lack of trust in your dealership, about poor customer service at your dealership, and about evidence of dishonesty by the finance and service departments. Just to summarize, here are the issues we have: 1. A certified pre owned 4 wheel drive vehicle sold to us with significantly mismatched tires, which is known to cause damage to the drive train and is not recommended in terms of safe operation. This fact violates the trust with the dealer, as had we noticed the tire issue prior to purchase, the discussion about purchase would have been a very different one. 2. In addition to the mismatch, the rear tires looked visibly cracked, thin treads, wear line visible – they were in very poor condition. This is again a trust issue. 3. During the initial purchase dealer financing department tried to overcharge us by over a thousand dollars by incorrectly adding the costs – someone I and many others experienced at a certain type of dealer. The kind that people probably should not be dealing with. 4. Good year, Firestone, and our local mechanic confirmed wear line is showing on the rear tires and that tires have maybe 100-200 miles left on them. Likewise they confirmed that this vehicle should not be driven given the tire mismatch without tire replacement. 5. Russel dealer service department claimed 50% of life left on tires despite obvious evidence to the contrary. This is straight up dishonesty by the service department. 6. Minimal responsiveness from both dealer side and service department side to address our concerns; this is consistent with very poor customer service. 7. Final offer by dealer for us to pay to replace the tires with a discount on labor was barely acceptable (based on incorrect claim that 50% of life left on rear tires and ignoring the fact that dealer should not have sold a 4WD vehicle with mismatched tires). Overall this has been nearly the worst vehicle purchasing experience in this family’s history, mitigated only by the fact that Kevin Roy was polite and not pushy during the initial purchase. I don’t think I’d feel comfortable purchasing or servicing any vehicles at Russel Toyota and hope that we will not be doing any business with Russel Toyota in the future. Again - this is due to issues of lack of trust, poor customer service, and a poor service department. We feel strongly enough about this to pass our significant concerns along to others as well as, hopefully, to someone in the Toyota organization who might actually care about the above issues, as the Russel Dealership clearly does not.