Unless the pickup is failing its smog tests, and driving around with expired registration, it's operating pretty well I promise.

Regarding oil consumption, that might be possible, but would eventually clog up the catalytic converters with an oily residue and also cause OBD2 faults for bad catalytic converter efficiency.

Maybe they're leaking it on the ground I suppose.

Or it's two stroke oil for the leaf blower.

What we do screen for a bit is basically time wasters. It is possible to be accidentally picked up in this net, and then say "they sure missed out, I bought a car at the next place". That's unfortunate for the salesperson sure, but you're ignoring the countless hours saved by quickly dismissing the true time wasters.

I sold cars and was very good at it (better than top 1%) and would sometimes get in a mood when I would ignore intuition for a few weeks and just do an amazing job with everyone. Doing an amazing job works well, and you can get people to buy a car who swear they stopped with ZERO intention of actually buying a car that month even, very often. But you almost never even get CLOSE to selling a car to someone you have a bad vibe about, even if you go all in.

If you're good at car sales, you have more people to follow up with and do a good job with than you have time. I sold 34 cars a month average over years. National average is 11. Eventually you have to trust your judgement to save yourself 10+ hours a week, even if once a month it costs you a sale.

I'm not going to bother responding to the rest as it's clear there's some misremembering or exaggeration going on here.

In my experience, the things you are describing are very rare, and even more rarely intentional. Why they keep happening to you, idk.

2. A new car is new as long as it hasn't had a registered owner. You can even have a new car with an already started warranty sometimes. I still wonder how you made it to the paperwork stage without seeing the car and noticing it wasn't exactly 'new new', but if you landed on a very shady salesperson it could be covered up (simply leaving the dashboard display on a trip meter instead of odometer could do this I suppose)... But once again.. I STILL think it's more of an accidental miscommunication than deception since everyone knows it will eventually be discovered. Dealerships sell many "demos" year round, and I've also never seen this drama in person even though demo sales are common industry wide.

3. Clerical errors do happen when a salesperson gives management a summary, a salesmanager loads a deal into the system, and a "finance manager" (I hate them) finished loading things so that the DMV and banks are happy. It does happen. It isn't a tactic because once again, people rarely miss a $1000 line item, or the payment going up suddenly.. so why have the drama, potential deal blow up, yada yada.. the salesperson doesn't get paid on non vehicle adds ons or fees, and management gets such a small cut of gross profit I just don't believe it's done on purpose since it has a high threshold of drama.

4. I have never seen this, and I can't even imagine how we'd get the computer system to do this. Also, the banks would reject a contract later that doesn't add up and send the deal back. And finally, who is intentially commiting this kind of fraud on a document that will forever exist in your hands and the banks hands. Would there be an easier way to get caught for some crazy fraud than having numbers not add up on a final contract?

My basic summary of the entire absurdity of the common tactic of "what's the best price you can do?" is as follows..

The best price is a vague concept depending on where we want to draw the line.

Best price I can do and keep my boss happy with my performance?

Best price I can do if I want to be below average at this company?

Best price I can do if I want to ask for a personal favor from my boss to allow me to heavily discount this car beyond established metrics we have and sell it this one time?

Best price I can do if I want to be yelled at tomorrow morning?

Best price I can do if I want both my boss and I to be yelled at tomorrow?

Best price I can do if I want my boss to negatively impact his career by the owner seeing him make deals like this too often?

Best price I can do if I want to get myself or my boss fired the next day? I could probably somehow secretly sell a car $10k under what I should... Once.

Where do we stop? Some nice people pay MSRP. Some people ask for a gesture of a discount. Some people ask for what discount is fair to market and we'd be ok with, and take it. Some people want below market, and we try to stop it if the car is in demand or we have enough volume. Some people want prices so low they'd fall into the "negatively impact the salesperson or teams career". Sometimes we even take those, but it's always a calculation between taking a below market average offer or waiting for one of the earlier described people to walk in.

2. I assume the car was looked at and maybe test driven. I find it hard to believe this was a 'ruse' left for the final moments. I can imagine people getting confused or not hearing or understanding I suppose.. someone wants a discount, salesperson says we have a demo over here we can do a large discount on.. and somehow the miles or reason for discount were not discussed. I wouldn't call this a ruse, and once again not something I've done or seen since it's just a waste of time. Obviously the person will discover the miles at some point, so why have the drama.

3. Illegal to pad a term sheet and then stuff a $1000 'charge'. You'd atleast have to have the customer sign the contract for what they were getting for their $1000. Dealers attempt to add things often, but they can't be secretly padded into the initial payment discussions. It's superficially easy for a customer to snap a photo of a preemptive term sheet and burn a dealership at the DMV dealers office or back out a whole deal months or even years after purchase if this was documented. Again, not something I saw in 10 years.

4. I saw countless people get confused by the "total" on the contract, usually when selling a used car to a less mathematically and logical buyer for some reason. You can sell a Porsche to an accountant and all goes great everytime, but sell a used Corvette to someone that personally requested a 72 month loan and watch drama unfold as he wonders why the total of payments on his $50k car is $70k. Luckily I was good and could always explain reality of sales tax, registration, and interest to these people. But not everyone is so lucky.

Maybe the dealerships I worked at were above average in integrity, because they were high performers and high performers don't have time to fraud induced drama, but honestly if you land on a dumb salesperson that can't explain your confusion to you, you can end up thinking your confusion was their attempt at a scam.

If a car is in demand, it sells near MSRP. If it's a high volume commodity that's hard to sell in the required numbers, you can discount it heavily. If everyone wanted to buy a car at "the best possible deal you've done in the last 90 days" dealerships would basically be out of business by definition. So someone has to hold the line or the entire system doesn't even work.

Im a very frugal person and don't even buy new cars, but why some people think they deserve to pay less than their neighbor did blows my mind still to this day.

And your comments about SF people are absolutely true, and I live here.