Southwest Kia of Rosenberg - My girlfriend's car was stolen by this dealership

My girlfriend's car was stolen by the dealer that sold it to her

One week ago my girlfriend and I drove out to the Kia Southwest Rosenberg dealership to buy a car. Before I tell my story, if you only read this far, take a lesson: never buy from them.

We'd seen an ad in the paper offering a 2009 Kia for $59 down and $159 payments over 72 months at a 6.9 APR. We needed a second car (have been sharing one for a year) and we thought that was a pretty good deal, so we made the long drive out there.

As you might expect, that offer was no longer available. We told them that if they had something comparable we'd look at it; otherwise we'd leave. They showed us a car that was indeed comparable and that we liked so we drove it and went in to talk about a purchase.

Long story short, she bought the car. We couldn't quite get the advertised deal but we got one we were happy with: 2009 Kia Rio, 33K miles, great condition, $0 down, $200/month over five years, 9.9%APR, 60K mile/5 year warranty. The purchase was confirmed and all that was left was a quick wash and tuneup and I was running late to get back to the theatre where we were doing a play that night, so I left.

While I was gone the dealer convinced my girlfriend to agree to a better, longer warranty at a slightly increased rate. The monthly rate went up to $238 but the warranty went up to 100K miles/10 years. She signed, got a copy of the contract, everybody shook hands and she drove it off the lot.

The next day the dealer started calling frantically asking her to provide an employment contract. For the last year my girlfriend has been teaching as an adjunct professor at HCC (while also taking professional acting gigs as she's a union actress), but she was recently hired as a full time professor with a much higher salary and good benefits. But she hadn't gotten her contract yet so she couldn't send it to the dealer. She said she'd get it as soon as possible and get it to them. She went to her boss, to HR, to the college president, trying everything she could to get it to them asap, but it took five days. HCC is a big bureacracy after all and it is also summer. For each of those five days they called approximately 10 times a day, demanding that she act faster and basically calling her a liar.

Then she sent them the contract, which said everything it was supposed to, and the calls stopped. For one day.

Then today they said they needed her to come back and renegotiate the deal, that they wanted to remove the 100K mile warranty and go back to the deal we'd agreed to in the first place. But we didn't want to. We liked the deal we had and we had a contract and we didn't want to "renegotiate" and we had ownership of the car and, frankly, we didn't have time or desire to drive all the way back to Rosenberg to make our deal worse than it was. Besides that, we were pretty annoyed with the way they'd behaved over the last five days. So she said no. She said we have a contract and we like it and that's that. They said bring us back our car. She said no. They said if you don't bring it back by 9 pm we'll report it stolen. Well, she got pretty upset after that and got me involved.

I called and spoke with people at the Better Business Bureau, the Texas Dept. of Motor Vehicles, HPD and Rosenberg PD. Each of them said he had no right to report the car stolen or to repossess. And, of course, he didn't. She'd done nothing to violate her contract, the entirety of which included only true statements from her. In fact each of the people at these various agencies laughed at the idea and said that if he went forward he would be in big trouble. I also talked to my brother, who is a lawyer, and he told me they were trying to "yo-yo" us -- giving us a favorable contract and then calling later to insist on us signing a worse one. He said it happens all the time.

I called and told him about all the officials that said he couldn't report the car stolen. He said, "This conversation's over" and hung up.

After that, my girlfriend actually drove out to the Rosenberg PD and talked to a cop. He said there had been a lot of complaints about that dealer and that if anything were to happen we should file a report.

One hour later the car was gone from our driveway. Repo'd. Stolen.

I called the Rosenberg PD and they said it was Houston's problem since it was taken here. So I had a police officer come out here and take a report. He explained to me that it was a civil matter and that there was nothing they could do and nothing we could do but to sue them.

Now we're out the two days we spent on this (buying the car and then freaking out about it all day) and we're out of a way for the two of us to get to work, as we now work basically the same hours on different sides of town.

Moral of the story, never, EVER go to Kia Southwest in Rosenberg. They are crooks, they are liars and they are thieves.

 

Those who know me here know that I don't tend to shrink from a fight. If there's a way to hurt them, I will. I don't even care about the car or money, I just want them to pay.

As for buying a used Kia (and at a high rate), well, we're both artists and we don't make a lot of money. We're comfortable, but just barely, and neither of us has great credit, so we take what we can get. We were really in love with the car. It seemed very reliable and very affordable (fit into our monthly budget fine) and it had a good warranty so we were content. Until we weren't.