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Comment by SavantIdiot | Hacker News Reader

>t scamming me into overpriced financing deals.

Um, you are admitting that you can be scammed. If you don't understand loans, yes, you can be scammed. Don't admit that.

The last new car I bought: I walked into the lot, said I want that one, and took the lowest interest loan for 48 months. I didn't want a 72 month loan. I didn't want an extended warranty. I was done with the sales person in 15 minutes, and done with the finance department in 45 minutes.

It's all in how you manage the situation. If you waffle and flake and can't decide, or don't understand loans or pointless "extras", then you're toast.

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I just bought a car. I wanted to pay cash, and made it clear I would come back with the a cashier check the next day when my bank open. They said in order to “lock” the car in for me overnight, that I’d have to sign up for a loan (that I could just pay off immediately). It took a bunch of back and forth to make it clear I just wanted to pay cash and I’d be back tomorrow with a check. They finally relented and said ok we’ll put a complimentary hold on the car and accepted the fact I was paying cash. Then of course after finalizing that they pushed a bunch of vastly overpriced maintenance programs and severely misrepresented the expected costs of said maintenance if I didn’t purchase the plan. At least they had the courtesy to give me the time to quickly run the numbers in order to verify it was a terrible deal for me.

The whole point is that buying a Tesla doesn’t involve this pointless, anti-consumer, borderline lying, slimey process. People shouldn’t have to worry about being scammed when making one of the largest purchases in their life. The traditional dealership model is terrible for your average consumer. Why on earth are you defending that?

You could have just said, have a nice day, and left.

Were you that desperate for a car immediately?

I'm not defending slimy car salespeople, but I'm not siding with your wishy-washy behavior.

So I could go to another dealership and have the exact same experience?

This is such a weird hill to die on.

Where would the person go? For most cars, you have to go to a cars salesperson

It is incredibly alarming to me that your message is "Don't let yourself get scammed" rather than "Yeah, car dealerships should stop trying to scam people."

It's both. You need to advocate for yourself and not just decide to be a victim, and the government needs to regulate many, many predatory industries because half the population is below average intelligence, and, well, I believe a government is supposed to lookout for its citizenry (including when I get too old to understand tech and people try to take advantage of me, which they will). Yeah, go ahead and call me a nanny-state liberal. I'm OK with that.

Needing to push through people who are trying to scam you is very unpleasant for many people. Others get a kick out of it, I get that, but it just not being a part of the process at all is a big win for me.

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