First things first…. When I bought my car at Van Horn, they sat me down to write a review. Then the review they sent me to approve said things I didn’t say. Things like “I’ll buy all my cars from Jim in the future…” Also, it omitted things I DID say, like “This took wayyy too long.” So, in the interest of honesty, I’ve taken the time and trouble to write a real, honest review. To do so, I had to contact the company that manages the reviews, as the review Van Horn sent me was not editable. In all fairness to customerlobby, they made this part easy enough.
I found the car I wanted online. It happened to be at Van Horn in Sheboygan. That’s 2 hours from me, so I called them at 10 AM to express my intent to buy the car. I spoke with Joe Harris, who was with a customer. He called back an hour later and said the car wouldn’t be ready until after 3 PM, so I made an appointment with him at 3:30.
When I got there at 3:30, Joe was with another customer (despite the appointment he made with me.) He passed me off to Jim. Jim was friendly enough, and did a valiant job of stalling for FIVE MORE HOURS. There was a holdup in detailing (I was told the car was ready.) There were delays in financing (I have stellar credit, around 800.) There was no way to get a spare key (the parts department was closed by then.) It was as if they didn’t know I was coming. Yet they did. The reality is that they advertised a car for sale that was not ready for sale, and then failed to get it ready in the 5-1/2 hours they had to do so before I arrived. So they made me wait for 5 more hours while they took care of some (not all) of those details. I felt bad for Jim. He was stuck stalling for others. To be perfectly clear, Jim was a nice enough guy. Everyone was nice enough. Just not competent enough.
By the time I sat down in the finance department it was dark out. Evan made several attempts at the paperwork, shredded a bunch of docs, tried again, got some help from another guy, and ultimately delivered docs that were all messed up. I know this because a month later I am still dealing with the repercussions. My name was wrong. My social security number was wrong. Other finance companies are still sending me rejections because they had docs submitted to them with wrong numbers on them.
I left Van Horn at 8:30 PM feeling quite frustrated with all the time it took. Then I looked at the gas gauge. The car had less than a quarter tank of gas in it. I mentioned this when I called attempting to straighten out the paperwork, and Jim said he would look into getting me a gas card… That never happened. Instead, I got a Christmas form letter from Jim that actually said “…about time for me to sell you another car.”
So, to summarize, Van Horn Hyundai Mazda (who knew I was coming all day), kept me waiting for 5 additional hours onsite to sell me a car with one key, 3 gallons of gas, and paperwork that had to be redone. Given an opportunity to do some damage control, they coughed up some lip service and zero action. FYI, I paid the full asking price plus $2.3k in warranty extensions.
I won’t be back.
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