Paul Miller Volkswagen of Bernardsville

Fair pricing and straightforward transaction. Every thing you want in a used car buying experience. thing you want in a used car buying experience. More

The good: We bought a pre-owned 2019 Jetta. The car seems solid (although we've only driven it for a few weeks). The price was reasonable. The dealership is pleasant enough. The bad, and downright brutal solid (although we've only driven it for a few weeks). The price was reasonable. The dealership is pleasant enough. The bad, and downright brutal: We went to Paul Miller Volkswagen looking to buy a pre-owned car on 2/13/2021. We were living in Manhattan, and were moving to Brooklyn two days later. Our move and work situation necessitated us buying a car. Since Paul Miller is in New Jersey (and we were registering in New York State), I called ahead of our appointment and asked if this would be a problem. The general manager assured me that they were a “one stop shop” and could take care of the registration themselves; they would even mail us the plates. Great, we say. Avoiding the DMV would be an added bonus. We get there on Saturday 2/13. They’re generally nice and pleasant. For some reason they have my appointment under the name Anthony (my name is Lance); but it’s all good--it’s COVID, and things are hard to hear over the phone. I think it’s kind of funny, even when they keep doing the paperwork under the name Anthony. Our salesperson and general manager offer us models to test drive. We like one of the cars and decide to buy it. Our salesperson was pretty straightforward, which we appreciated. He drafts up our paperwork and gives it to the finance guy. We get to the finance guy, and we discover all of our paperwork to buy the car was done under the name Anthony. Again, kind of funny, but when I tell the finance guy my name is actually Lance, he slams his desk in front of my wife and I, and yells at our salesperson for messing up the name. Clearly they don’t have a good relationship. He tells us it’s gonna take another half an hour, though we really don’t mind. Stuff like this happens, no big deal. Half an hour passes, and we’re back in the finance guy’s office. His sales tactics to buy add-ons (warranty, something with tires), are aggressive and off-putting, but nothing too alarming. He attempts to rush us through reading all the paperwork, which seemed unprofessional, but again, whatever. He didn’t seem happy about the fact that we were buying the car up front (cash) instead of monthly payments. The whole process takes a few hours, and we are excited to leave with the car fully paid for--of course, our salesperson tries to give us our temporary registration under the name Anthony--to which for the first time, I more sternly say we’d really appreciate if we could have a legal registration under my actual name, Lance. They do it, and all is good. They ask us to leave a review, I say I’d leave a great review. Had what happened next not happened, I would’ve written a short and very positive 5 star review. But behold, the reason for this novel: A few weeks go by, and we don’t hear anything from our salesperson. At this point, we are still waiting for our car to be registered, and be sent the permanent license plates. Initially we figure this is normal. Our temporary registration expires on March 14, but they said it would probably take two weeks. On the morning of March 5, still hearing nothing, I decide to reach out. A few hours later, our salesperson told us that we never updated our address. To be completely fair, he had warned us that this was important. Since we were moving 2 days after we bought the car, we hadn’t yet updated our new address with the DMV. My wife updated hers as we were sitting there talking to him, on 2/13. When I went to do it the next day there was a problem with the site through the rest of Presidents Day weekend, but on Tuesday morning 2/16, after sitting on hold for one hour and thirty seven minutes, I was able to update my information over the phone. (In NYS, you simply have to update your information with the DMV in order to register your car). So we had our information completely updated Feb 16, and it is now March 5. Yet, he tells us our information isn’t updated. We tell him it is, and has been for well over 2 weeks. Had we needed to notify him that we did this, we would have. But he never asked or followed up about it. He asks us to send a copy of our licenses. As per New York State law, a new physical license isn’t needed. If they simply ran our information, they would know our address was updated. Nonetheless, I send over confirmation that our addresses are updated with the DMV. Nothing happens. At this point, I realize that this issue is possibly beyond our salesperson. While this is all happening, my wife brings up that our salesperson kept thinking we were moving to New Jersey, not Brooklyn, and that this could’ve been the reason for the confusion on his end; that in Paul Miller Volkswagen’s world I was not Lance of Brooklyn, but Anthony of New Jersey. To be fair to Paul Miller Volkswagen, Anthony from New Jersey and Lance from Brooklyn are probably pretty similar people in a lot of aspects of life. Though legal car registration info is not one of them. It’s Saturday 3/6 now, and I call the general manager to explain the situation. I tell him that it sounds like there was a misunderstanding, and if they could just send our info to the DMV ASAP it would be greatly appreciated, because our temporary registration expires on 3/14. He says they have to wait until Monday for their “DMV clerk,” but he’d call me on Monday 3/8 and figure out what the problem is. No problem, I say. He doesn’t call on Monday 3/8, so I call them. Getting the sense that they think we messed up, they say they’ll send our updated information to their “MV clerk.” The finance guy then calls me up, and says we didn’t update our address, and that we needed to send over a copy of our new licenses. I explain to him that in NYS you don’t have to have an updated physical license to register a new car, as long as your information is updated with the DMV. Since they are the ones who are the professional car salesmen and not me, I find it odd that I have to explain this multiple times to them, but that is neither here nor there. He doesn’t seem convinced that updating our info with the NYS DMV (aka, the law) is sufficient, but says he’ll send our information through. On Tuesday 3/9, I send a follow-up email confirming that they sent everything to the DMV. They tell us they sent everything to their MV Clerk. It appears this is where the hold up was last time, so I email back. “Great, thank you. I'm guessing if there's any problems we'll hear from them?” They don’t respond, so my wife follows up on Thursday, 3/11, asking if our paperwork was sent to the DMV. They don’t respond to her. She sends another email on Friday 3/12 that says the same thing. They don’t respond to her again. Our temp registration expires on 3/14. Since we park the car on the street in Brooklyn, we realize if we leave our car on the street with a temporary registration, we’ll certainly get ticketed. We definitely don’t want to spend money on parking it in a garage, and even if we did do that, who knows if a garage would take an expired car. Luckily, my parents live about 90 minutes away, so I am able to drive the car there over the weekend and we leave it in their driveway. Relevant sidenote: Part of the car purchase was a several hundred dollar “paperwork fee” that in part took care of them registering the car and sending us the plates; this fee is well above what the NYS DMV charges to do it yourself, but we factored it into overall cost of the car relative to dealerships in NYS, and the fee seemed fair enough. Plus, our salesperson said we would probably get a small amount of that fee back at the end, because the whole process would probably be a little less than what they charged--and we would have to get the car inspected ourselves given they were in New Jersey and we were in New York. (This ended up happening--we got $52.13 back.) However, we bring up the fact that since they did not follow through on their end of the bargain (i.e., register our car and send our plates on time), if a partial refund on the paperwork fee was possible. They act like it’s beyond them to do such a thing. It’s probably also important to note that if they simply gave us one or two hundred dollars back for their mistakes, I would not have written any of this review. It is now Monday 3/15, and our temp registration is expired. They didn’t respond to my wife’s last two emails, so she sends a third one. This one is pretty stern, and finally gets their attention. They reach out to the MV clerk (as far as we can tell, it doesn’t appear they did this at all in the entire week before). She tells us they are waiting for “checks” to be signed. We don’t know what these are, and our finance person tells us it’s something on their end, and that they are very backed up. He also says in an email. “You can print this out and keep with your temporary registration. In the event you get pulled over you can show the police officer we are in the process of finalizing the MV. We have not heard of any customers getting tickets.” In other words, he is advising us to drive our car with an expired registration, and if we have a problem, to show an officer a print out of an arbitrary email that confirms that our car is not yet registered. Overall, the lack of timely responses--and the overall tone of the responses we do get--gives us the sense that we are inconveniencing them by asking about our expired registration and license plates that we purchased from them. Still unsure if our information will actually be sent where it needs to go, we eventually get the finance person on the phone. My wife comments that we could’ve the registration ourselves (and actually got it done) for way less money, and the finance person starts doing what I could consider the dictionary definition of gaslighting--telling her she’s wrong about the fees, arguing over what are ultimately inconsequential numbers. I end up taking the phone and he claims there’s nothing he can do, and that his boss, the general manager, would call me. The general manager calls me about five hours later, and apologizes a bunch--it appears it’s taken until now for them to realize there is a problem, or even admit that they were at all at fault. On Wednesday morning 3/17, I email them again, asking if our information was sent to the DMV. They don’t respond. I send another email 6 hours later. This time they do respond. It appears it took this second email and over two days for them to finally follow back up with the MV clerk to see what the status with the “checks” were. They say it’s now at the plating service, and everything should take about two weeks. Finally, we make progress. The entire next week they don’t follow up at all, but during that week I am able to see on the NYS DMV site that our car is registered. (Phew!). On Monday, March 29, I get a call from the general manager saying they finally have our plates, that they’re gonna FedEx them, and they will arrive on Wednesday 3/31. This is 17 days after our temporary registration expired, and 46 days after purchasing our car. Sapped of any sort of energy, I just tell him thanks so much, relieved that this absurd saga is finally coming to a close. Wednesday 3/31 rolls around and FedEx never comes. Obviously, Paul Miller didn’t send us a tracking number. The evening of 3/31, I get a call from FedEx. It appears that Paul Miller Volkswagen wrote the wrong address (!) on the package, so it was misdelivered. Luckily, due solely to the competence of the FedEx employee who recognized there was an issue, we were able to rectify Paul Miller Volkswagen’s error. The next day, our plates finally come. Fittingly, it’s April Fools day. **** TL;DR: The car itself is good, which ultimately is the most important thing. But the rest, an absolute catastrophe. I don’t think I’ve written a negative online review of anything in my life, but this felt necessary. More

After driving the vw the car looked good and sound. We made arrangements to purchase car. Dealer said that the car would be detailed & cleaned. WELL it was washed only when we got home we looked over c made arrangements to purchase car. Dealer said that the car would be detailed & cleaned. WELL it was washed only when we got home we looked over car the glove box still had the previous owners paperwork in it & personal stuff including a used mask in the center console (not happy) if we knew that was there we would have never took the car also missing was the owners manual and warranty book. The financial manager was very nice and pleasant to work with the salesman should have checked the vehicle over before delivery after the sale was complete he never showed us anything more about the car just stood at the door and never walked over to the car with us I blame the salesman & service preparation department for not making sure all was done properly even though we liked the car we will never purchase a vehicle there again. More

I just had the worst experience with Paul Miller Volkswagen and I was trying to be a repeat customer. I had bought a Jetta from them back in 2018 and had a wonderful experience. The salesman I bou Volkswagen and I was trying to be a repeat customer. I had bought a Jetta from them back in 2018 and had a wonderful experience. The salesman I bought the car from is no longer there. In my current experience and in my opinion, the salesman was very dismissive and not at all helpful. I called the GM (Edward Schoonmaker) of the dealership and left a message to discuss. He did not return my call. HORRIBLE! HORRIBLE! HORRIBLE! Go to Flemington VW. They know how to treat a customer well. More

Excellent , Comfortable Car Buying Experience Within the past year we've bought two vehicles from the Paul Miller group and have been so totally satisfied with our purchases that we don't intend t Within the past year we've bought two vehicles from the Paul Miller group and have been so totally satisfied with our purchases that we don't intend to patronize any other manufacturer's dealerships in the future. The personal service and lack of sales pressure my wife and I pleasantly experienced from the moment we entered your showrooms (Volkswagen and BMW) instantly reassured us there was no need to look elsewhere. Kudos to Paul Miller employees and their management team for the ease with which business plans are set up and executed at every level to guarantee a goal of overall dedication and customer satisfaction. Thank you , Charles & Michele Piehler More

FANTASTIC EXPERIENCE I firmly believe that when you buy a car, you need a dealer who fully understands your situation and exactly what you need. I've bought a few cars in I firmly believe that when you buy a car, you need a dealer who fully understands your situation and exactly what you need. I've bought a few cars in my life and all of them have come from this place. I will not go anywhere else. This most recent time was especially great however. I walk in and immediately I was greeted by my new friend, Bill Devine who took me right over to his desk and within minutes we were test driving exactly what I was looking for!! He's my guy moving forward, won't go to anyone else and I highly recommend him. He talked with me, got to know me and from that picked out the perfect car to put me in that will be great for both my daughter and myself. Go see Bill, you won't regret it!!! More

Very nice and friendly customer service. Our experience with Paul Miller Volkswagen was great. Sales advisor was Tom Purtell. He is very professional and kind person. He was spend a lot of ti Our experience with Paul Miller Volkswagen was great. Sales advisor was Tom Purtell. He is very professional and kind person. He was spend a lot of time to explaining us every details about car, about the process of sale and trade-in, registration new car, etc. All price, tax and fees was clear and easy to understanding. I'm really recommend this dealership. More

Very friendly and excellent customer service Very good experience. I bought a 2015 gti autobahn from them and Oscar Matamoros was the sales man. He was nothing short of professional. Very knowle Very good experience. I bought a 2015 gti autobahn from them and Oscar Matamoros was the sales man. He was nothing short of professional. Very knowledgeable about the car, features, and the whole process. I highly recommend anyone looking for a new or used car to check these guys out. A very laid back atmosphere the entire time. He makes sure you understand how to adjust all of the features and really went above and beyond what your average car salesman would do. Thanks for a great experience. More

Treated like family What a fantastic bunch of professionals. Second time buying a car from them and let me tell you it just gets better. My sincere thanks to Oscar,Ryan a What a fantastic bunch of professionals. Second time buying a car from them and let me tell you it just gets better. My sincere thanks to Oscar,Ryan and Kerry for really making us feel like part of their family. I would highly recommend Paul Miller VW to anyone who is looking for a vehicle without any hassle. Thanks again More