Bad news to Toyota Corolla fans

[timtemtym]

Originally Posted by ginmqi

Exactly.

Contrary to what some (many?) believe, car salesmen as a whole are NOT car experts or car enthusiasts. They are salesmen first and foremost. And a few probably are true enthusiasts (like the general population). Their first and foremost is to use universal sales tactics to get you to buy that car as quickly as possible and not let you leave that dealer lot.

They memorize the brochures and maybe pickup some common car knowledge and that's about it.

It's pretty embarrassing when true car guys step onto dealer lots and have to correct the salesmen...and even then some salesmen insist they are right on certain things when they clearly have no idea what they're talking about.

This phenomenon decreases dramatically for certain models (supercars where salesmen are likely trained specifically on those cars like the new NSX, and higher end dealerships that cater to sports car crowd like say Porsche

This is so true! I took a friend to the Lexus dealership and this salesman knew nothing about the car. I'm not a car enthusiast, but I research like crazy so I was showing my friend all the features (neither of us care to look at an engine other than to research the reliability and ZOOMiness). This salesman had no idea what his IS models did.

Same thing at the Infiniti dealerships (we visited two). Once the salesman saw I knew about the features, he spent our test drive talking about living in Peru. The second Infiniti guy knew even less. I was shocked. We ended up buying the Inifiniti (used Q50). It was eye opening.

My first car was a corolla (96). Other than having to replace the inside door handles every few months (the dealer gave them to us for free because they just kept snapping off), we had no problems with that car.