Should have Trusted My Gut on that Car Salesman and his contract

Should have Trusted My Gut on that Car Salesman and his contract

We get along quite well, particularly for a couple that has been married for many years, raised six children, and don’t always see eye to eye on certain things. One of those “things” is warranties on vehicles. Jen likes to prepay for a maintenance contract, while I prefer to hope for the best, and just pay the bill if something goes wrong. Which approach is better? We don’t agree on that, but we both agree on this: Don’t ever buy a warranty from BMW of Newport, which is part of the Grieco Family Company. For that matter, I’d suggest not dealing with them at all. Check out their Google reviews–more one star reviews than I’ve ever seen, but even more five stars, with virtually none in between, which is a very odd mix. We didn’t write them a review, but if we had it would have been negative stars. 

So here’s what happened: First of all, we tend to buy gently used cars, and drive them for a long time, passing them along to our kids as they become old enough to drive. Since we live in the country, a car is something of a necessity for the kids, so whenever something happens to one of our cars, there’s often a shuffling of who drives which car. The chain of events that landed us at BMW of Newport started when Jen passed along her very reliable but aging Subaru Outback to Erin (our youngest), and bought a Certified Pre Owned BMW X5 from BMW of Newport, along with a maintenance contract. We purchased from this particular dealership solely because they had the vehicle that had the combination of features Jen was looking for–Certified Pre Owned, large enough to hold her real estate signs, a subtle exterior color and the best possible sound system. 

Erin’s Subaru was subsequently totaled when a lady heading to the ski area ran a stop sign right here in Princeton. Erin was shaken up but unscathed, while the car was a total loss. This resulted in her inheriting a 1999 Lexus, which we had inherited from my mother (Erin’s still driving it and it runs great). 

Unfortunately, our next crashed car was the X5 which had replaced the Subaru. It was totaled in a freak snowstorm on Bolton Road in Westminster (the steep road alongside the ski area). In Jen’s defense, there were 16 crashes that day in Westminster, and the one after hers was a motorcycle crash on Main Street–so she wasn’t the only one surprised by this snow. She was, however, probably the only one who hit a tree that had a No Parking sign on it. Her error was deciding to take the shortest route home from an early morning appointment (over the mountain) where she would have been much better off taking the numbered routes to get from Lanes Road in Westminster over to Mirick Road, but she was hungry and wanted to get home. 

This necessitated us having to make a quick decision to replace a car that we’d had only for about 8 months, so we bought yet another gently-used Certified Pre Owned darker gray with a great sound system X5, but not from BMW of Newport. Jen is still driving it, with now over 100K miles. However, the brand loyalty is gone.

After the crash, and while going through the insurance claim process, we encountered a big problem with the maintenance contract on that totaled X5 we purchased from BMW of Newport, and the contract, as they usually are, wasn’t transferable. Luckily for us however, or so we thought, was that totaling a car entitled us to a prorated refund for the unused portion of the maintenance contract we’d purchased. Since that’s exactly what had happened, we asked for our prorated refund, as described in the contract, but BMW of Newport absolutely refused to refund anything at all because “Rhode Island is a nonrefundable state”, which was clearly stated in the contract.

Since we’d paid $2,295 for the 100,000 miles maintenance contract, and only used it for an oil change, this led into a number of polite attempts to convince BMW of Newport to give us the refund, a process that went nowhere. In fact, we literally couldn’t even get anyone to call us back after perhaps eight or nine phone calls. 

It’s hard to have a one-way argument, since we couldn’t get any response from BMW of Newport, but we tried for a while, with emails and eventually a certified letter. Nothing happened by way of a response.

Our reason for believing we were entitled to a refund was simply because the contract said so…..if you total your car, you get your money back, prorated to reflect how long the contract was in effect. The reasoning given to us by BMW of Newport, and eventually by BMW of North America, to not give us a prorated refund was that “Rhode Island is a “non cancelable state”. That happens to be true, but is irrelevant, since as is clear from the contract itself, certain states allow a two month grace period, during which customers can change their mind about purchasing these types of contracts. Rhode Island doesn’t allow a grace period, but that concept was irrelevant to what had happened–we didn’t change our minds. Rather, our car was totaled, a subject dealt with in the contract. 

So after getting no response from BMW of Newport, we escalated our problem to BMW of North America. There at least we got a response, although not from the President, to whom we had addressed our complaint, but from someone else, who called us, left a message for us to call back, which we did, but we received again the exact same answer. 

We told the young man on the phone that because we weren’t getting an ounce of satisfaction, we’d be escalating the complaint to the Rhode Island Attorney General, and that the contract was so poorly written as to be nonsensical, but he just informed us that if the Attorney General’s Office called, he’d tell them exactly what he was telling us: that Rhode Island is a non refundable state. He also was rude about it. 

So we forwarded the complaint to the Rhode Island Attorney General’s office. Our complaint at this point was not only that the contract explicitly said we should get a refund, but that the contract itself was virtually incomprehensible. It was so riddled with inconsistencies, that it literally made no sense. As just an example, you couldn’t get a refund on the contract if X number of miles had been driven “from the original in service date of the car”, which really was confusing as we’d bought a ‘Certified Pre Owned vehicle’, not a new car. The contract would have been funny if it weren’t that we were out a fair amount of money.

The Office of the Rhode Island Attorney General, Peter Neronha, got involved. Our contention was that the contract we’d signed was misleading, contradictory, and extremely poorly written, and in fact the contract had so many contradictory statements and dates that it seemed as if no one had ever even proofread it. 

We sent a packet to our contact at the Attorney General’s office, with a copy of the contract and our notes on the contract. As we spent time going over the contract, it turned out to be much more poorly written than even we expected. 

The end result was that thanks to the Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office, we received correspondence from BMW of Newport asking us how much we’d take to settle. We settled for $1,800. We did not however get an apology of any sort, from anyone, including BMW of North America, so that along with other reasons, means we won’t be purchasing any BMWs again. Their onboard computers are terrible anyway.