Sharp practice exposed by online car companies.
Car Buying Experiences Case History’s The Tesla Model 3
Both wewantanycar and Motorway were involved here but both these examples end with Motorway.co.uk
Case 1.
A customer contacted us about selling his Tesla Model 3. Let’s call him Mike.
Mike had gone to several webuyanycar rivals before approaching us to sell his Tesla.
Below are the offers he explained he already had on the table…
Heres what our seller was offered by these 4 car buying companys
Their valuation disclaimers below copied from their websites.
£37431
Our free online valuation is a pre-inspection offer and is valid for 5 days. It is therefore possible to book in for an appointment within 5 days of receiving the valuation.
£37160
We make this price as accurate as possible but it’s not until we see your car and give it an onsite inspection that we can offer you a final price for your car. We guarantee our valuation for 4 days.
£38900
The Valuation is provided strictly on a ‘subject to contract’ basis and we have the absolute right to withdraw the Valuation at any time without any legal consequence or liability to you. The Valuation does not constitute an offer from us to purchase the Vehicle.
£39200
Your car will then be shared in our daily sale, and dealers in our nationwide network will make offers for your vehicle.
You can choose to accept and proceed with the highest offer we receive, which becomes your final sale price
What Happened Next
We looked at the Tesla values and sale prices and made a firm offer of £37500 and said we could view it at his home the following day.
But convinced by Motorway that he would get the £39200 they had suggested, he decided to cancel our viewing and instead go with them unless we could better their offer. We couldn’t.
We went back over the vehicle valuation in the office several times, triple checked the details against the market, chatted with dealers and continued to scratch our heads.
Then two weeks later Mike contacted us to see if we’d be interested in beating Motorways offer of £37500
“Hang about,” we said “that’s £1700 less than you said they quoted”
“Well, yes, they said they would try and get me that; that was the reserve price, but I think that you and I know that was ambitious.”
“And wewantanycar? Well, they came back at £37000.”, but that’s £1900, worst than their initial estimate,” we said.
So, because it was now after hours, we said we’d make some call’s and come back to him in the morning.
Talking to our dealers, it was clear that so many of them had been offered the vehicle from several different buying sites that it was difficult to find one that felt like making yet another offer to us.
This is the problem created by offering your car to several sites at once; for example, you wouldn’t auction a painting at several different art auctions simultaneously, as I am sure you can see, that would confuse all the potential buyers.
So, it took a while to get hold of one of our regular customers who always pay us that bit more because he knows that we inspect and deliver the cars ourselves, and he offered £37650
But when we got back to Mike, he had already been contacted by Motorway, who had talked him into accepting £37900, so he’d sold it.
Who Lost Out?
Well, we did, but unbeknown to the customer, so did he, because later that day, we got offered another £38200, but we were too late to the party, having been put out of the game by Motorways ridiculous reserve of £39200.
Case 2.
This one was almost identical, with Motorway offering £39613 for his 70 plate model 3 standard range plus.
Note the peculiar figure.
To put this figure into perspective, you can buy a new one, not identical but actually a better, facelifted car, for just £1400 more on a 71 plate brand new from Tesla available in two weeks at the time of writing.
This time the seller accepted a slightly lower offer than his reserve of £39613 and accepted £38950 from Motorway’s buyer.
This was also too high for us to comprehend until the seller told us that Motorway’s dealer had failed to show up after two weeks of chasing him.
Motorway put it back on the site for him, but this time the offers had all been very low, not unusual when dealers see a supposedly sold car appear back up for sale, as they assume that the first buyer pulled out due to some unspoken issue with the car.
How Does Motorway Work?
They replicate British Cars Auctions position in the supply chain; by pre-selling a customer’s car online, they then get the dealers to deal with the actual transaction directly with the seller and take a fee off the top for the introduction.
Just like an estate agent does when he’s selling a house
This is an interesting analogy because, like some estate agents, they appear to be using a technique sometimes employed in the property market of simply overstating what they think they’ll be able to sell someone property for.
They do this to make sure the seller chooses them to deal with the sale over the competition.
Some may call it overestimating or being overambitious others may call it lying to get your business.
30 years ago, when I was a naive car salesman getting indoctrinated into the dark world of old school salesmanship, it was called “Balling.”
What is Low Balling And High Balling
So we’re all familiar with the term low balling, which is when someone makes you a very low offer in an attempt to get you to reveal the figure you really want.
Sellers often misinterpret this as an attempt for a buyer to pay a low figure.
More usually, it’s used to open you up to talk about the figure you will sell at.
If all you tell the people trying to help you sell your car is ” I just want as much as possible”, then it’s tough for them to get much interest from their buyers.
Faced with open-ended figures, buyers often switch off, or they will often respond with ” so what do they actually want” or “what will they take”, if you can’t answer that question, then there’s really no endpoint to the negotiation.
So Motorway insist you set a reserve figure or a price you will sell at, and there’s nothing wrong with that; in fact, that is the correct way to deal with the sale of your car.
Too High An Expectation
But what if you feel their suggested figure is too low? or you suggest a figure that Motorway deems to be unrealistic?
Well, if it were us, then we’d tell you so, we’d explain that we felt your price was unrealistic, why that was and what we were more likely to achieve.
If we felt we could get within £500 or so of your figure, then we might tell you we would have a go, and if that didn’t do it for you, then we would wish you luck and leave the door open in case you changed your mind.
We might even give you a backup offer in case you got messed about by a competitor.
But what we would never dream of doing is giving you false expectations that we weren’t sure we could follow through on.
But Motorway seems to be using a different tactic.
Getting Balled
High balling is just the opposite of low balling, and it’s designed to get you back to the table when you’ve made it clear you’re getting several offers from competitors.
As a young and naive car salesman, I was actually taught this technique to use as a last resort as your prospective customer walked out of the showroom door announcing they were off to check out your competitor.
How To Know If You’re Being Lied To By Car Buying Companys.
How can you tell if you’re being Balled?
Unless you’re American, who use the word as slang for something very different, then balling your customer in the motor trade refers to the simple act of throwing them at the competition.
Just as you would a rubber ball against a wall and then catching it when it bounce’s back to you.
Your customer, “the ball”, is thrown at the competition with the suggestion of a deal you will “try” to get for them if they come back to you and give you another chance.
And this is going to be some offer. In fact, it’s essential that the suggested offer couldn’t even be close to reality because then there would be a chance someone would actually do it, and that’s the last thing you wanted.
So it had to be so unrealistic that the competition wouldn’t even bother making your customer a counteroffer so that they would bounce straight off that competitor, like a rubber ball off a wall, back to you.
In our opinion, this is exactly what technique Motorway used on these Tesla customers in these examples.
What makes our car buying service a better alternative to sites like webuyanycar.com and motorway.co.uk?
We pay what we quote online, charge no fee’s and never pass you over to third parties.
When you sell your car on our site, we make sure you only have to deal with us.
We make all the payments, inspect and collect your car.
In that way, we can guarantee a genuine 5 Star service with no fees, no lowered offers and no chance of being let down.
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