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.