Toyota Santa Monica

Top Notch!!!! Just purchased a car at the Agency and was impressed with the full team. Mayer, sales representative, went out of his way to assure our satisfaction Just purchased a car at the Agency and was impressed with the full team. Mayer, sales representative, went out of his way to assure our satisfaction. He was so diligent in showing us the various controls and features of the Toyota Mirai. He handled the paper work beautifully. He was backed up by Gene and Kevin in the Finance Department who really gave us the extra time necessary to complete our paper work. The experience could not have been better. More

Deceptive practices, lies about getting things done TL;DR - Shady, deceptive and false advertising dealer puts ‘permaplate’ coating which costs no more than $30-40 to put on, on ‘all’ of its cars that g TL;DR - Shady, deceptive and false advertising dealer puts ‘permaplate’ coating which costs no more than $30-40 to put on, on ‘all’ of its cars that go into the lot and adds on $595 USD unexpected charge at the end, claiming there’s ‘no way’ to take it off, and they simply ‘forgot’ to tell you when you were negotiating for a price. FYI PermaPlate is fancier wax, will last 2-3 months MAX does nothing for your car. Absolute unfair and deceptive methods by lack of disclosure upfront. The price you agree on is NOT the price you pay! Furthermore, I’ve literally called them probably over a dozen times in the past week and a half and every one up, down Joe, Henry, Camden, Cayllen, everyone keeps promising to send records of this vehicle and they claim to send screen shots of them sending it and they wrote notes to their supervisors. Nothing has happened. All a bunch of lies. >>> Recently I found myself looking for a Prius. Not just any Prius, but a specific Prius that had a specific set of packages. Between the inability of people to distinguish different packages of Priuses, and Toyota having gotten rid of this particular feature in its newer models, I had to look for a used Prius. Having found several choices across CA, I settled on a particular Prius offered by Toyota of Santa Monica. I verified the car’s availability (found on autotrader.com, verified on their specific website) before calling the sales rep and further confirming the car’s status. I wish I could say this was a smooth transaction but for some reason AFTER we had agreed on a price, everything started going down hill. First, the dealer was pretty unreasonable, I was willing to put down a deposit but they didn’t want to hold the car more than 24 hours despite the fact that the knew we didn’t live in Santa Monica. So in a mad rush, while still trying to get our deposit down and trying to meet the dealer’s unreasonable demands of first not holding the car at all, and then taking a deposit at over HALF of the value of the car itself … I found myself scrambling to buy a last minute one way ticket (over $200+) for the very next day at 7AM to fly down to LAX to get this car. Not only that, but we mobilized family & friends in the area to see who could be there to do pick up and help facilitate the transaction. While we were in the midst of this madness of coordinating and already heavily investing in definitely buying this car (yes checked Carfax ourselves etc.), we were still waiting for the dealer’s “finance” department to come take the deposit. Of course, we have already HEAVILY relied on the fact that they were selling this vehicle to us since we have detrimental ourselves to getting there early AM and already agreed on a purchase price. Then suddenly, the touchscreen wasn’t working. Of course we relied on the sales rep to disclose the entire condition of the car and somehow after hours of negotiations over the phone and even Facetime, this didn’t come up? So we had to go back and re-negotiate because they were unable to fix the touchscreen. Fine. We put down a deposit finally almost 7 hours after we started calling for this vehicle and getting everything ready to pick up this car, and they come back with the final price we had to come up with in-person tomorrow and it was almost $1000 more than the normal 10%-12% for taxes, registration and fees. There was one particular line item “after fees / we owe” that was $595.00 and NO explanation whatsoever of what this was. After again calling repeatedly and trying to figure out what was going on here, and why there was this HUGE upcharge, it turns out they put something called “PermaPlate” on the car and FAILED to “disclose” to this to us despite having negotiated a final price. This seems SUPER deceitful and unfair because they claim they put this on ALL their cars on the lot and it goes on immediately. First, if this goes on all your cars, shouldn’t you have disclosed it immediately up front or factored it into the price? Second, we never asked for this. What kind of dealer forces you into an option you do not get a chance to object to? Third we just negotiated lower for the failed touchscreen (an actual defect) and the price of this ‘permaplate’ was significantly more than what they gave us back for the bad touchscreen, which arguably is actually a necessary functional item. Second, we negotiated for over seven hours, how come at no point did this come up? They made it seem like they were doing us such a huge favor because we objected to this added cost that they were willing to ‘reduce’ it to $400. Again, I believe this is literally against consumer law protections to be doing unfair and deceptive ways to falsely advertise a car, negotiate a price, and suddenly add on something at the end. I can understand in some ways if you’re some random dealer, BUT THIS IS TOYOTA OF SANTA MONICA. Can no one be trusted in this industry? The problems don’t stop there! Upon finally getting to the dealer, as it turns out the rear left tailight was cracked. Again, lack of disclosure despite the sales rep KNOWING we trusted him, and we relied on him with substantial consideration on our part to get down there to get to this car, and they weren’t even willing to budget despite not having disclosed the cracked tail light to us earlier. This is an OEM priced item at $305.95 and they were barely willing to maybe offer $100 after we already explained how disastrous this transaction has seemed and how we were still here, invested way too much, to buy this car. I guess in some ways I should be thankful that we got this car, but in the end it was a terrible experience that we still overpaid for because they nickeled and dimed us on things that they did not disclose or unfairly forced us to accept. I hope Toyota HQ will do something about this and these types of practices because it really gives them a bad name when it comes to people buying their cars directly from their dealerships. Oh, and needless to say, I don’t recommend Toyota of Santa Monica or any of the sales reps there because apparently we ‘talked’ to them all and escalated to the sales manager and they were all shady and deceptive. I give this business and its consumer oriented practices an F. More

Great Service Our adviser, Joanna Tsymbaliuk, made sure we received the best and quickest service! She made sure we were given the recall service that we did not e Our adviser, Joanna Tsymbaliuk, made sure we received the best and quickest service! She made sure we were given the recall service that we did not even find out about until after we visited. More