Have you seen those commercials for the 30 day test drive? Chrysler is billing it as employee pricing plus – like you’re getting employee pricing on the car plus one heck of a great deal. I submit that you may or may not be getting the employee price, but you’ll certainly be getting something out of it. You just may not like what you get.
If you happen to catch the fine print on the commercial, you might notice that if you return your vehicle within that 30-day window, you’re liable for a 5% “restocking” fee. Since a dealer will never be able to sell that car as new again, and likely see a depreciation of something like 25% (perhaps more), this may not be a bad deal.
Let’s look a little deeper.
A quick look-see at the Chrysler web site shows the cheapest vehicle is the PT Cruiser at a base price of $15,125. I don’t suspect you’ll be able to find it for that price anywhere in the world, but let’s run with it. This means that the restocking fee on that is around $750. Not bad for a month’s use of a car, really. Even the cheapest cars in the cheapest markets will set you back $50 or so a day to rent, not counting taxes and whatnot, so you’d be looking at an easy $1500 right there. What’s that? I didn’t mention taxes? Whoops. My bad.
If you read the fine print of that there contract, you see you need to pay those taxes up-front. That means that if you live in Charlotte, you’ll be paying another $900 smackers, or a bit more than double that initial estimate.
And since we’re reading the fine print, there is a $0.50 fee per mile driven, too. Since most of us drive 12,000 miles per year, that’s an average of 1,000 miles in the course of a month, or another $500. Now we’re talking $2150 (actually, $2165, but what’s $15 among friends?) or $71 per day. Still not too bad perhaps, but perhaps not as nice as it seemed up-front, and you’ve still been driving a PT Cruiser for a month.
What’s that? You didn’t realize that to get this deal you had to finance through Chrysler Financial? Yep. That means you’ll need to pay another small fee, and if you decide to keep your car in the end, you’ll likely pay a higher interest rate. Maybe this isn’t such a great deal after all.
After all, you could probably rent one for a couple days for a lot less than this would end up costing you. The only variable in the equation in the mileage, and that’s not a large part of it. The restocking fee, the taxes, the financing fees, those are all fixed, no matter if you keep it for four days, two weeks or the full thirty days.
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One response to “Chrysler's 30-Day Return Program”
Sneaky marketing, good sleuthing there. Not that we should be terribly surprised that they are both covering their asses and making a dollar at the same time. I figure they are hedging on the principle that people don’t return things. I tried to find the citation but I’m wondering if it was on tv. Some study/report that showed how television marketing of the idea that you can get a ‘money back guarantee’ is rarely used even in the face of a problem. Yet those words will often sway a consumer into buying a product in the face of a logical argument because they feel safe in that option.
Why I commonly hear ‘Moooo’ out of so much of the consumer base.