Crazy Dealership Stories - Lehto's Law Ep. 2.22

hello and welcome once again to Latos ball I'm Steve Leto attorney at law and state of Michigan or I'm practicing a lot of 24 years in the fields of consumer protection and lemon law a frequent rider my stuff appears on Jalopnik opposite lock in a variety of other places and I've written a few books including a book called the new lemon law Bible everything the smart consumer needs to know about automobile law it's on Amazon you can buy it there for 12 bucks or if you want a copy today and for Half Price email me directly I'll hook you up for six bucks that includes postage and my autograph signed copy the new lemon law Bible six bucks email me directly late till at Kenan calm Ellie hto at ke n an O n calm and I'll hook you up now this week were talking about crazy dealership stories crazy things dealerships have done they never cease to amaze me and each time I catch one I realize that 99 more got away and they each try to outdo the others with crazier and crazier stuff I mentioned a couple weeks ago the story about the car dealership that ran the ad after the North American International Auto Show they said we have the Auto Show special come on down give us a hundred bucks and then you pay a hundred dollars a month you'll get a Jeep Grand Cherokee for a year so for $1,300 total you'll get a Jeep Grand Cherokee for one year it's a lease and of course they took the money they never gave anybody anything and so we filed a lawsuit turn it into a class-action settled it and got these people their stuff back but the point is that they did that I have no idea what they're planning on doing with that I think what they were hoping to do wasn't you came back and complained they'd say well you know something we ran out of Jeeps do you want something else and then of course they'd overcharge you on something else anything they can do to get you in the door sometimes what they're trying to do with the car dealership and that gets us to the next story somebody recently asked me if I've ever been in front of the judge scary Mary and they're talking about marriage sure is now ski in Macomb County Michigan and yes I have been and Mary's famous because she often gives people a second chance but she often does it by giving them the choice and that is she'll say I'll give you a second chance but you don't want to get back in front of me so you screw up you're gonna pay but if you take advantage of this one last opportunity to get your life together we'll both be happy and so they've done documentaries on or I've seen her on national TV and they've tracked down some of the people who've been in front of her and they often say yes she saved my life because she was the one who did the wake-up call who basically said if you don't get your act together you're gonna wind up in prison so that's scary Mary and yes I've been in front of it and like many circuit court judges in Michigan she handles both civil cases and criminal cases and I don't do criminal stuff that often I was in front of run a civil case and I had a case where my client lives in Macomb County and he got a thing in the mail one day from a car dealership car dealership sends out these letters and it says enclosed please find a key this key might fit a car on our showroom floor and if it does fit you can have the car and in the fine print it says we've sent out ten thousand keys and one of them fits this car your odds of winning are one in 10,000 so my client goes into the dealership says I got this key they say come on over here of course they you know they don't think anybody's gonna actually come in and win this thing my client gets in the car puts in the key turns and car starts oh my gosh we have a winner people are running around blowing off those party things as balloons falling from the sky is all kinds of confetti in the air they take his picture they give him a polaroid picture of him in front of the car he'd just won they say come back tomorrow and do the paperwork so the next day he comes back in they say you know something it was a problem you weren't supposed to win so you don't get the car and he says what do you mean I don't get the car and they said well the key that we sent you wasn't supposed to work we don't know why that key worked we know who got the winning key and and it wasn't supposed to be you so therefore we don't know how you did it but you don't get the car sorry and they later announced that nobody to won the car so my client calls me up and says hey you know what what do you think of this and I said it sounds like a scam to me so we filed a lawsuit and we found in Macomb County cuz that's where the car dealership was and next thing we know we're in front of the judge married sure is now ski later nicknamed scary Mary and she hasn't said a pre-trial conference she says okay guys come back in the office here we'll talk and she asked me what the case is all about and I tell her what I just told you and then the defense attorney starts to talk and says well you know we don't know how the guy did it but he wasn't supposed to win and the judge says I don't care his key started the car he won doesn't you get the car the guy said well your honor it's not that easy because you have to understand the company that actually motional company that does this contest they keep track of who gets the winning key and the winning key went to somebody who didn't come in and she said okay then how do you explain the fact that this guy has the winning key and the attorneys were not quite sure how he pulled it off but we think he pulled some kind of scam okay now again my guys just some guy off the street he's not a wizard he's not a magician he's not an engineer or a mechanic at a Dodge dealership there's no anything about how Keys work he didn't pull off a scam he's not a locksmith okay and so this is the first I'd heard of it and the attorney says yeah we think the guy pulled off some kind of scam and I turned to the judges your honor my client I'll take a polygraph and the judge looks at the defense attorney says well if the guy will take a polygraph he passes he should win right and the defense attorney says well your honor my client won't agree to that now here's the interesting thing about polygraphs okay and this is a little known fact polygraphs are often just as valuable when they're not used as when they are used okay so the police officer has come up to you and they say hey you know did you do such-and-such can you say no I didn't and they say well we think you did and they say will you take a polygraph if you say no I won't take a polygraph they go okay so guys probably lying now you haven't taken the polygraph yet how do they know that because anybody who's innocent would say sure I'll take a polygraph why wouldn't it take a body now I understand there's guys out there there's attorneys out there who are listening me saying Steve you and I both know that you wouldn't want your defendant in a criminal case taking a polygraph willy-nilly okay and I understand that I understand it my point is simply this that in a simple situation like a civil lawsuit where says something like this at stake there's no problem with saying like I'll take a polygraph and it's just funny watching the defense attorney go oh we wouldn't agree to that the judge immediately looks at us and goes okay mr. late to his clients obviously righteous here and the defendants are being jackasses because they're the ones who are saying we wouldn't believe a polygraph and the judge looks the defense thing is we quite wait you don't like polygraphs or your client doesn't like them and the guy goes well your honor Mike my client doesn't like them as if he discussed this with his client which and we know he hadn't because I had just brought it up for the first time at the settlement conference the pre-trial conference and so the judge goes how about this go out right now call your client the phone run this I your client and explain to your client that I like polygraphs and the guy said okay well I'll go and see and he went out in the hallway and he went down to a payphone this is I think actually before cellphones were allowed in the building and he comes back here's what your honor my client will reluctantly agree to this and I said okay so a settlement is this here's this is a simple case my client will take a polygraph by a licensed certified polygraph examiner will agree on the guy okay so in other words I'm not gonna just go yank a guy to the phone book and and and tell the defendant I'll pick somebody and you can examine his credentials and say yes or no we agree to that and my guy will take the polygraph and the polygraph examiner is going to say either this guy passes or he fails if he passes we win we get all the relief relief in our lawsuit and if he fails we lose case dismissed game over right now and judge said hey sounds good to me defense attorney says well I guess so and as you might imagine my client and I went through a list of polygraph examiner's we got on the back of the Michigan Bar Journal where they advertised and I sent the list over to the defense attorney said do you have an objection to any of these and of course the guy can't say object any they're all licensed and certified polygraph examiner's and he says nope pick one we picked one my guy goes in passes with flying colors case is closed case is over my guy wins and that's a great example of a very simple way to solve a case as for what happened with the car dealership when they sent out those letters with the keys they don't actually do that themselves okay the dealership didn't actually come up with this idea on their own they didn't have a bunch of people sitting around stuffing envelopes with keys there's promotional companies out to the pitch these different contests to car dealers even do this in the radio industry they do this in a lot of industries where they'll have promotional contests and companies run these promotions and the promotional contest company comes to the dealership and says here's what we'll do we're gonna mail out 10,000 envelopes you'll get a response rate probably 500 people will come in so the odds of somebody coming in with winning key are 500 out of 10,000 or one in 20 and therefore your odds having to give the car away are one in twenty and you can buy a bond against that or like an insurance policy against that so then if you if you do wind up giving the car away it's only gonna cost you well gran and if you don't give the car away it's gonna cost you a couple hundred bucks but whatever the cost of promotion is it'll still do well because you're gonna sell so many cars to the 500 people who come in in response to this ad now I understand I might not have those numbers correct I'm making stuff up here as I go along in terms of the numbers but that's how the concept works okay and so what happened was they accidentally sent the key to the wrong person or they didn't keep track of who got the winning key but for whatever reason they accidentally sent the winning key to my client my client shows up and for whatever reason they were going to actually say he wasn't supposed to win and I'm sure many of you have heard about examples of people go to Vegas for instance and they go and they and they win at a slot machine and they win some gigantic jackpot in fact the Daily Mail had an article last week about this where a woman won a multi-million dollar jackpot and that casino workers came over so sorry this jackpot wasn't supposed to get paid out today therefore you lose and you're like what I thought if I spin the wheels and it comes up and says you win I win and of course the way the laws work in casinos there really are no laws and the casino can say anything they want including your machine wasn't supposed to pay off today therefore you lose and they paint her a couple bucks but he's not give her the multi million dollars that she asked for that's the crazy world of casinos but again they weren't expecting my guy to win but when he did win they should have owned up to it and they didn't so yes I've dealt with scary married before but she wasn't scary because she agreed with our concept of how to settle the case and I'm sure the defense attorney was disappointed because he was hoping to spin his wheels and rack up hundreds of billable hours take all kinds of depositions and bring in experts on how automotive keys work and then go to trial and have a trial that hinged entirely on the credibility of my witness and call my guy a liar and say he'd somehow ripped off a car dealership when in reality he just won the car they didn't want to give it to him so eventually they had to give it to him and the case ended so that was my one experience there and it's also the one experience I've had with polygraphs or lie detectors now a couple other crazy things that had happened with car dealerships and strangely enough two of them have to do with wheels on cars and I had a guy who went to a car dealership and he ordered a truck he's special ordered a limited edition truck okay and it's a very very particular truck it's kind of a loud looking truck I'm not too crazy about them it's another Chrysler product but he buys this truck he special orders they call me go dude your truck is in and he goes by the dealership and he sees it it looks beautiful and he goes great and they go but it's no we're still prepping it come back tomorrow and pick the truck up so the next day he goes in to pick his truck up he signs a paperwork he gets in his truck and as soon as he pulls out the lot the truck starts wobbling and it starts wobbling horribly really really bad as if as if not just wheels being out of balance but like something bent or screwed up underneath the truck he turns around and brings it back immediately to the dealership those guys I don't know what's wrong with his truck it's brand new I literally just had it ten minutes and the truck vibrates like him you wouldn't believe when I get above like 10 miles an hour there's something wrong with it oh don't worry it's probably just the tires needing balance or whatever long story short he winds up bringing it back three or four times almost immediately because they keep rebalancing the tires and rebalancing the wheels and what happened to his truck was they special-ordered it it was sitting on the lot overnight and somebody came by and stole the wheels off of it and when they stole the wheels off that they weren't exactly careful about how they put the vehicle on the ground afterwards so I suspect they simply pulled the wheel up and dropped it so they'd been to something underneath the vehicle I don't know they bent something with where the wheels go on or they bent something in suspension but they bent something in the vehicle so when they came in the day Mike Lansing to pick up his vehicle and they see that the truck is sitting there with no wheels or tires on it they simply said oh quick slap some more tires wheels on it sell it to this guy so my guy picks up his vehicle he doesn't realize what happens when they never told him by the way and when he takes the vehicle and drives it and it's like this he winds up with a lemon almost immediately and we send the last chance letter to Chrysler and Chrysler says this is strange a vehicle it's got this kind of problems so quickly it was such a like miniscule mileage this is crazy what's wrong with us and of course what is crazy is that the vehicle was damaged by vandals who stole the wheels the dealership did a hodgepodge job of fixing it didn't tell my client about the damage that had been done to the vehicle and what happened is they basically forced Chrysler to buy the vehicle back because chrysler one to buying the vehicle back from my client and my it's going this is just the weirdest thing why did the dealership tell me the truth why didn't you know well we know why because by doing it the way they did it Chrysler bought that vehicle back and it was the dealerships fault the dealership should have had better security or when the vehicle got dropped in the ground with no wheels on it they should have said gee maybe we should take this thing out test drive it and see what's been damaged other than the wheels being removed because if a professional pit crew removes all four wheels and it puts four wheels back on they might do it well okay when some of hoodlums do it at night in the dark working in a hurry using whatever tools they could cobble together they probably didn't do it real carefully so the damage makes sense okay so they shouldn't have done it that way but it's a crazy thing a dealership did speaking of wheels at another client who bought a 70 or 80 thousand dollar luxury car and looked really really nice and it's one of these things that you wouldn't notice unless it pointed it out to you but the vehicle came with wheels and the wheels were chromed and they were not chromed from the factory so my client gets this vehicle he's driving it and any time he gets above a certain speed the car starts to vibrate now it's an expensive luxury car he brings it back to dealership so we'll take care of it and they tried balancing the tires every time he brings it in they they balance the tires it take tires off of remount Amaury balance in the trying everything at one point they've got nine pounds of lead weights and this guy's tires nothing they do can flip this vehicle back in balance and we filed the lawsuit a different manufacturer this time it's not Chrysler and the manufacturers attorney calls me up when they go Steve because did you ever look at your clients wheels and I said not that closely why and he said well he goes you need to step back and look ease you're probably looking at the wheel way too looking at the tires he goes but the wheels are chrome and I said yeah so what he goes they're not chromed from the factory and I started thinking about it I go whoa who chromed him and he goes that dealership takes it upon themselves when they get the brand-new vehicles off of the car hauler ok they bring them into the dealership they pull the wheels off they pull the tires off and they send the wheels out at the wheels chrome to some place and whoever's chroming the wheels isn't doing it in a way in which they stay balanced and if at their chroming them in such a way that they can't be balanced properly apparently so I don't know I again I understand there's me some listeners when I say Steve you don't understand a chroming works I admit it I don't I have no idea how chroming works all I know is that my client said look I walked onto the showroom for nasaw the car looked nice and I bought it paid cash for it okay it had chrome wheels but it didn't occur to me that those chrome wheels were aftermarket chrome wheels because they were the correct wheels for that car from that manufacturer the dealership had simply chromed them okay and apparently the addition of that chrome is what throws them out of balance cuz the manufacturer was telling me this and he goes so Steve he goes here's the weird thing he goes we're gonna buy this vehicle back from you okay the manufacturers buying it back he said trust me he's we're gonna make the dealership pay and we've told them stop chroming the wheels there's a reason that we don't chrome the number one they don't look as good as the actual wheels did I don't think it's one of those things you might not catch but on the other hand they also might not stand balance as well ok so again like I said I have no idea how we'll chroming works all I know is the manufacturer bought back this vehicle because the four wheels have been chromed by the dealership unbeknownst to my client and that kept those wheels from ever going back into balance or at least not back into balance easily and I can tell you because the manufacturer bought that vehicle back so those are just a couple crazy dealership stories trust me I got more and I keep encountering more every day as I go along in my life because that's what I do for a living at Latos law calm lah TOS l8w calm contact me there for questions comments or story ideas also again if you want to copy the new lemon law Bible everything the smart consumer needs to know about automobile law twelve bucks on Amazon six bucks from me email me directly late to it kenan calm le hto at Kenan dot kind of course I'm on Twitter at Steve later at ste vele hto this shows an iTunes stitcher SoundCloud and YouTube thanks for watching and listening bye-bye

Channel: Steve Lehto

Views: 87,472

Rating: 4.9440413 out of 5

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Id: gJcl8eA-9C0

Length: 17min 44sec (1064 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2016