The 'tricks' of car dealers to reduce prices and compete for customers

In the final months of 2017, a series of price cuts were launched by car manufacturers; fierce competition between dealers to attract customers in a gloomy market.

Although manufacturers only offer incentive programs such as registration fee support, car purchase with gifts,... dealers are willing to deduct cash directly from the car price for customers or reduce the price by tens of millions of dong to attract customers.

Typically, in early October, a series of car companies announced price reductions such as Toyota offering registration fee incentives from 15 to 30 million VND, Mazda and Kia also offering incentives from 5 to 26 million VND for customers buying Morning, Cerato and Sorento.

Other car manufacturers such as Nissan also reduced prices from 5-70 million or Mitsubishi offered incentives of 40-170 million VND depending on the version.

Dealers compete to reduce prices shockingly

However, the price war does not stop at the incentives of the car company, but in fact, the dealers are the ones that offer the biggest discounts. Although, in normal times, dealers also offer discounts for customers, the discounts only stop at about 5 to 15.20 million VND, not tens of millions, or even up to 100 million as at present.

Typically, the Toyota Vios model is currently being discounted by dealers by about 50 million VND, bringing the actual selling price of this model below the 500 million VND mark and much lower than at the beginning of 2017.

Normally, customers who buy this best-selling car model in the Vietnamese market do not receive many incentives, only from 5 to 10 million VND or after-sales services. Not only Vios, the old version of Camry is also discounted by dealers from 75 to 100 million VND to clear inventory.

Using "tricks", a series of agents were "stoned"

Not only do car dealers offer strong discounts, they also compete with each other in consulting and advertising to attract customers during a sluggish market. During Honda's recent clearance sale, many dealers were accused of "betrayal" by customers because they took deposits and then failed to deliver the cars to customers.

Because the 200 million VND clearance sale program for CR-V cars only had a certain number of cars, but the dealers' staff still enthusiastically "invited" and advised customers. After that, Honda and these dealers had no cars to deliver to customers, making many users extremely dissatisfied.

Besides Honda's case, Ford Ha Thanh dealer was also accused by users of advising customers to buy Explorer 2017 but selling them the 2016 version. This incident was discovered by users after they went to register their vehicle, making them extremely angry.

A representative of Ford Ha Thanh said that the information about the car's production year of 2017 written on the contract was just a "typing error" and the dealer is considering compensating 30 million VND as requested by the buyer because they do not want to set a bad precedent.

However, Ms. Le Thi Hien, representative of Duc Thao Company Limited - the unit that bought the Ford Explorer at Ford Ha Thanh, said: "After discovering that the year of manufacture of the car was not as per the contract, 2017, we went to work with Ford Ha Thanh but received an apology and did not agree to reconcile with Ford Ha Thanh." Ms. Hien also said that she will pursue the case to the end to claim her legitimate rights.

According to Young Knowledge