Prius Wars

In this economy it makes sense to save. Despite stimulus, the banks get it, and so do we. I’m not about to give up any more money than I need to. As a result we decided to start the process of getting rid of my leased Camry and getting a Prius. Now mind you, the objective was to pay nothing down, to walk away from the Camry, to get a lower payment and to have a more economical car. The Prius seemed like the way to go, but it could have easily been a Ford, a lower end Toyota or Honda.




Dealers seem to have misunderstood the objective, despite our communication otherwise. I’ll premise this with the fact that every Toyota dealer in town had advertised a level 2 Prius at $249 per month, no down, no first payment and 24 months of service at no charge. We knew the leased Camry would be a crap shoot and we did not do our homework on that first day. What we did do was contact the dealer we dealt with for the leased Camry. They seemed to have treated us right, though they did “inform” us that the last dealer had ripped us off….not sure I believe that, but that seems to be their underhanded way. It’s like going to a new hairdresser that trashes your old hairdresser…you have the business, don’t be an ass. So we went back to Mossy Toyota, Yes, I want to say the name, because you should know how we were treated. We emailed our situation and bottom line days before. We prequalified online with flying colors. We spoke to the salesperson several times. Our objective was clear. We arrived at the dealership, they took another hour to again prequalify us. We drove the Prius. After 90 minutes they offered us a completely lame deal, claiming we owed too many payments on the Camry (lease was up in 2/11). We countered and ultimately walked after the “bad cop” came over to let us know we “beat up” our salesperson and that they simply could not do the deal. He did offer us the deal we wanted, but let us know Toyota (not his dealership) would come after us for anything they felt was wrong with the Camry after the fact. Seriously? You had the facts days ago….do the deal, don’t do it. Don’t waste my time. Mossy Toyota, you’ll get all the bad but true reviews I can go to. www.ratemydealer.com



So we walked from that with a really negative feeling. The following morning, a Saturday, we emailed every dealer in San Diego. Same info, same “demands”, same trade in or leased turn in etc. We got a few calls right away. The first was Toyota of San Diego. As a side note, we would love to buy/lease at Toyota of El Cajon but the city recently passed a ridiculous tax increase, so they were out of the running), OK, so if you are still reading, thank you. I want to reward the great people we dealt with. However, they weren’t at Toyota of San Diego on Mission Gorge. We spoke to someone whose brother also works at the dealership, but the names fail me…so did they. Again, we had spelled out the terms of the deal we wanted. This dealer told us that Toyota had a deal going on that they would pay off the last six months of the lease…..funny…Mossy didn’t mention that. The variable had been the leased Camry. We looked up bluebook and trade in value. Yes the Camry had some bumps and bruises. As a Toyota dealer if they took the car in, they could fix the defects for pennies on the regular market. The idiots came back to us with a bullshit deal. We kindly informed them that we had made our requests known previously and would have never wasted their time if they could not do the deal. They countered a couple times and we stood our ground which lead the “bad cop” to get involved who was kind enough to counsel me on Kelly Blue Book definitions. Their issue, like Mossy was the Camry. I was told I should have “know better” if I read the blue book definitions. I didn’t like that. (sarcasm)



So we were feeling like it wasn’t going to happen. The thing is, we have six months on the lease. But, for a few more days Toyota is supposed to pay the lease of the existing car off. We had gotten a call from Bob Baker Toyota the same day. We told them we would keep them as a back up. We were feeling beat up and defeated. Donald bought his 4 Runner there years ago and we have since heard good things about them. We decided on the way home to stop there. We would spell out our terms, show the Camry, make our demands and give them a few minutes. Truth be told it didn’t start well. We sat there and no one said much to us. Compared to the other places they were dead. We gave them a deadline and luckily someone came to help us. We had emailed with Xavier, but he was out with clients. We dealt with Hector, Hector gave our terms to Patrick, the Sales Manager. Patrick appraised the Camry and came back to us in 10 minutes that he could do the deal exactly as we outlined. They came back with the reasonable blue book value and honored all the other Toyota terms. It took 10 minutes for them to come back to us with the deal we asked for. Bob Baker Toyota, Xavier, Hector and Patrick, you guys are amazing.