If you are headed to this dealership, read this first. There is one practice here that I can only call deceptive, and it will cost you almost a thousand dollars you never saw coming.
The car is listed online at one price. When I asked them to send me the numbers, I expected to see the vehicle price, taxes, and the doc fee. Instead, the very first worksheet they sent, before any discounts, already had a roughly $990 “Resistall” undercoating package built into it. I never asked for it. It appears nowhere in the price they advertise online. You only find out about it once you sit down to get the real financials. I asked to have it removed, and Ben Scott would not take it off, having it conveyed to me through my sales rep that it is some kind of mandatory practice. There is nothing mandatory about it. Forcing a $990 spray onto a 2021 with 7,000 miles that already carries a factory corrosion warranty, and refusing to remove it, is a deceptive practice, plain and simple.
There is also a $999 “doc fee.” This one is at least posted on the website listing, so credit for disclosing it, but it is still BS. North Carolina has no law requiring a dealer to charge a doc fee, so $999 is a number this dealership chose. For reference, the title and tag work on my deal, the actual government paperwork, was itemized at $113, and the real cost of processing the paperwork is under $50. Their $999 is also above the North Carolina state average of around $799.
To be fair, they did discount the car. The worksheet shows $988 off which brings it to an even $20,000, and that is a perfectly reasonable price for a five year old Golf. I had no problem with the price. My problem is what they stack on top of it. A fair price should just be a fair price. Instead, once you are in, they pile on nearly two thousand dollars in fees you cannot decline, a doc fee you do not legally owe and a spray you never asked for. They offered $500 off which still means I would pay $1,500 in fluff.
If you still buy here, negotiate the out the door total, not the sticker, and do not believe anyone who tells you the undercoating or the doc fee is required. Neither one is.
Update: Ben Scott called me on his cell phone to berate me for this review. I asked him to point out the inaccuracies and he said they discounted it off. You see the worksheet I attached. $990 for a coating. Not sure what to tell him. Really pleasant experience from someone I hadn’t previously spoken to.