After last week's rather serious reflection on 25 years behind a microphone, I decided we could all use something a little lighter this week.
So, let's talk about lying.
Specifically, lying about cars.
I spent most of my adult life in the automobile business before moving full-time into radio, and if there is one thing I learned, it is that nobody has a monopoly on stretching the truth. Car dealers have certainly earned their share of the reputation, and I've spent the past 25 years warning people about dealerships that play games. But in the interest of fairness, I think it's time somebody finally stood up for America's beleaguered car salespeople.
Customers lie too.
Boy, do they.
One of my favorites was always: “I'm just looking.”
Nobody drove across town on a Saturday afternoon, fought traffic, pulled into a car dealership, parked, got out of the car, walked through 200 vehicles and started opening doors because there was nothing good on television.
You may not be buying today, and that's perfectly fine. But you're looking for a reason.
Of course, salespeople had their own version: “I've got somebody else looking at this car.”
Sometimes that was absolutely true.
Sometimes the other buyer was roughly as real as the Easter Bunny.
Then there was the trade-in.
I can't tell you how many vehicles arrived at dealerships with a mysterious problem the owner had apparently discovered approximately seven seconds earlier.
“Wow, it's never made that noise before.”
Really?
Because judging by the sound coming from underneath it, that noise began sometime during the Reagan administration.
Then came the dashboard warning light.
“That just came on.”
Naturally.
It waited faithfully for 84,000 miles and then, apparently overwhelmed by the sight of a dealership sign, illuminated itself as you turned into the driveway.
We'd appraise trades with transmissions slipping so badly you could measure the shift in minutes instead of seconds, air conditioners blowing approximately the same temperature as a hair dryer, windows that wouldn't roll down, doors that wouldn't open and engines making noises normally associated with agricultural equipment.
Yet the owner would look genuinely surprised.
“Huh. That's weird.”
It certainly is.
One of the all-time classics was: “It was owned by a little old lady who only drove it to church.”
That little old lady must have had a church 700 miles away and attended services six days a week, because the odometer had 178,000 miles on it.
Another favorite: “It's all highway miles.”
Apparently every used car in America spent its entire life traveling peacefully at 65 miles per hour on an interstate highway. Nobody ever drove one through rush-hour traffic, sat in a school pickup line, made a two-mile trip to the grocery store or floored it leaving a stoplight.
All highway miles.
I heard another one thousands of times when somebody was trading a vehicle with a mechanical problem.
“My mechanic says it's only a $50 part.”
This always raised an obvious question in my mind.
If a $50 part would turn your broken $5,000 car into a perfectly good $8,000 car, why didn't your mechanic put the $50 part on it?
Apparently that would have been too easy.
Dealers weren't innocent either.
There was the famous: “We're losing money on this deal.”
Sometimes we really were. Dealers occasionally sell cars at losses for all sorts of legitimate reasons.
But if every deal a salesman claimed was losing money actually lost money, the dealership would have been a Spirit Halloween store by November.
Then there was: “My manager is going to kill me.”
No, he wasn't.
He might throw a pencil.
I knew managers who could make a yellow legal pad airborne from impressive distances, but actual fatalities over a car deal were exceedingly rare.
Another favorite from customers was the mysterious competing offer.
“The dealer down the street said he'd sell me the exact same car for $3,000 less.”
That always produced the same question from me:
“Why didn't you buy it?”
Then came the silence.
It was amazing how often the other dealership suddenly became difficult to identify.
Of course, dealers had their own variation: “This price is only good today.”
There were occasions when that really was true. Incentives expire, month-end matters and inventory changes.
But there were also plenty of cars whose supposedly once-in-a-lifetime price was miraculously still available when the sun came up the next morning.
Perhaps the greatest automotive lie of all, though, belongs neither to dealers nor customers.
It belongs to all of us.
“I'm going to keep this one forever.”
I've said it.
You've probably said it.
This is it. The perfect car. We're done trading. We're going to pay it off, maintain it and drive it until the wheels fall off.
Then three years later somebody redesigns the model, adds 75 horsepower, installs a 14-inch screen and comes up with a paint color we suddenly cannot imagine living without.
Forever turns out to be 42 months.
After all my years in the car business, I've come to believe most of these little automotive lies aren't particularly sinister. They're part of the strange dance buyers and sellers have been doing since somebody traded the first horse for something with an engine.
The problems start when the lie isn't funny anymore.
Lying about a vehicle's condition isn't funny. Hiding an accident isn't funny. Misrepresenting financing isn't funny. Advertising a price nobody can actually buy the car for isn't funny. Neither is a customer knowingly concealing something that materially affects the value of a trade.
There's a difference between negotiating and deceiving somebody.
I learned that distinction a long time ago.
The funny part is that despite all the technology that has transformed the automobile business, the basic human behavior hasn't changed much. Today customers arrive with pricing information, vehicle histories, online reviews and enough research on their phones to know almost as much about the car as the salesperson.
Yet somewhere in America this very Saturday, a customer will pull into a dealership with an engine knocking loudly enough to frighten nearby wildlife.
A salesperson will walk over.
The customer will turn off the engine, step out and smile.
The salesperson will ask, “How can I help you?”
And the customer will say:
“I'm just looking.”
Some things in the car business may never change.
Straight Talk and Honest Answers — always.
-Jerry