America's North Shore Journal

2009 Chevy Impala LT

We brought our new car home yes­ter­day. it is a 2009 Chevro­let Impala LT. The Dealer is Doyle Chevro­let in Web­ster, New York.

I'm going to post on our expe­ri­ence with the car and the dealer from time to time.

Ini­tial thoughts:

As I antic­i­pated, the voice com­mand fea­tures for OnStar work poorly for me. I have a lat­eral lisp and my speech is non-standard enough that voice recog­ni­tion pro­grams have prob­lems. OnStar being one.

I am look­ing for­ward to XM radio.

The driver's seat is power, the front passenger's is not. We went with the cloth seats, and the bench in the front and I think that's why. The rear seats were split in the model we looked at but are not in the model we received.

Our sales­man has been doing this about a month or so. He worked very hard, hours, to find us what we wanted.

That said, the over­all sales expe­ri­ence at Doyle Chevro­let was less than optimal.

We went in Sat­ur­day, because a sales­man had called us based on an inter­net inquiry I sent. That sales­man was "with a cus­tomer" and as far as I could tell no one else was going to tell him we were there. After a decent wait we asked if some­one else could help and got Ed.

Ed worked very hard for us. Being new, he was rough and raw. I had to sug­gest to him at one point that if he kept beat­ing a par­tic­u­lar dead horse, he would lose the sale.

He had no printed busi­ness cards, just gener­ics with his name writ­ten on them.

We were picked up by the cour­tesy van yes­ter­day. The dri­ver was very nice and we arrived at the time we had arranged with the sales man. Only… to dis­cover that the Finance Man­ager was "busy". He was tak­ing some sort of test and was not avail­able for customers.

We killed some time vis­it­ing then were finally ush­ered into his office. We had asked if he could come to us because of my wife's mobil­ity issues but he would not. So, we schlepped all the way across the build­ing to him.

He had the usual pile of papers for the wife to sign, and the usual expen­sive add-on war­ranties and stuff. When we told him we were not inter­ested in any of them, he got a lit­tle gruff and abrupt.

Mind you, we paid cash, over $20,000, for the car.

And there was noth­ing in his papers that he could not have brought to us, sav­ing the lovely wife the entirely unnec­es­sary walk.

We had an addi­tional wait, since he seemed to think that we had a trade in, though clearly we did not. They had to obtain the insur­ance info and get plates for our car, stuff that should have been done well before our arrival.

Hav­ing been in the busi­ness world for decades, it was appar­ent that the sup­port for sales­men was lack­ing. Ed seemed on his own at times, and the folks that would be help­ing him went out of their way to make things dif­fi­cult. Other than for Ed, we were treated as if we were a nui­sance, not cash customers.

No attempt was made to sell us on the ser­vice side of the dealer. The Finance guy did not even say thank you for the pur­chase, but Ed did.

This link will take you to the Flickr photo set.