July 18, 2006

Where Is the Class Action Lawsuit?

NewsChannel5 has exposed a local car dealership for its bait-and-switch tactics. The Better Business Bureau has a huge stack of similar complaints about Bill Heard Chevrolet in Nashville. Bill Heard Chevrolet is part of a large group of dealerships, a deep pocket that I'm left wondering why no enterprising lawyer has yet collected all those complaints from the BBB and initiated a class-action lawsuit. In the meantime, if you're shopping for a car, I'd recommend steering clear of Bill Heard Chevrolet.

Update: Apparently, the Bill Heard chain of dealerships is beset with such problems.

A commenter posted: There's been a class action lawsuit in the process against Bill Heard Chevrolet in Florida. Bill Heard Chevrolet has also been subject to action by state officials in Georgia and in Tennessee due to deceptive business practices. Google yields a lot of background info about the conduct of Bill Heard dealerships in the past and recently.

I wouldn't buy a car from Bill Heard under any circumstances.

Update: This story is too valuable to let die. Here are some more comments from people who read the original post. See the extended portion of this entry, or click the comments link...

Smantix writes:

Bill Heard is so disreputable that they've turned me against ever buying another Chevrolet again. That a manufacturer would allow a nationwide dealership like this to besmirch their brand is either complicity or complacency and unacceptable either way.

I mistakenly took a car there for repairs two or three years ago. They charged $85 for a tow from across the street on Bell Road. Turns out, I had a faulty fuel pump so I knew I was going to get roughed up on the hood.

My mouth hit the floor when I received a phone call saying it was going to cost more than the Bluebook value of the car to fix it. I told them I didn't have the cash to cover it because, by this point, I had heard horror stories of them throwing people's car keys away. After about twenty minutes of me telling them that I didn't have the cash, they asked if I knew people I could borrow money from and then started coming off of the quote. Within that 20 minutes, they dropped the price of the repair by 60%.

I called another wrecker to pick my car up and took it to a different repair shop. Plus the additional tow, I saved hundreds compared to what Bill Heard tried to gank me over.

I cussed out two of their salespeople who were harassing patrons of the Cracker Barrel next door to them while they were trying to eat. They left and when the waitress came back over she said that they'd been high pressuring her to buy a car from them every day. Digusting business.

I did a story on Bill Heard Chevrolet for WSMV several years ago. Same stuff. Different year.

And that's the worst part of this. The Bill Heard company has been called on the carpet for these kind of shenanigans before, and it doesn't seem to stop them.

Perhaps this fish rots from the head down?