I bought a new Nissan Frontier truck a little while ago...around the time when the dollar hit parity with the American buck. I thought I did my research before buying as I found a Toyota dealership in town that picked up 4 new Frontiers from an American dealership and the price they wanted for each truck was about 31,000. I paid 34,000 from a Nissan dealership so I felt that the 3,000 dollar difference really wasn't all that out of line. I did talk to the salesman and manager about buying a truck from the states at which time they told me that the warrantee would not be honoured. Is this a fair and ethical business practice?? Imagine my surprise when, just for shits and giggles, after i bought the truck I logged onto an American dealerships website and found the very same vehicle in the states could be purchased for 11,000 dollars less!! That is about 1/3 the value of the vehicle which really is an obscene amount of profit. I was so irate I sent Nissan Canada a scathing letter complaining about how i'd been mistreated by Nissan. This was my 4th Nissan to make things worse so I felt that I could have been out as much as 30,000 dollars. About a month later someone called me from corporate Nissan office to let me know that my letter didn't go in the garbage, that they were actually doing something about it. I said please tell me what you've done. He stated that Nissan was offering substantial savings on new vehicles as indicated on all the commercials that were currently running on tv. Those substantial savings were in the order of 6,000 dollars so they still couldn't bring themselves to give Canadians a fair shake. We were still getting ripped off. Then the hammer fell...he said unfortunately they were not offering any retroactive deals. So those of us that paid the inflated price...too bad for us. I talked to him about buying American and not having the warrantee honoured and he said that wasn't true. As i stated in the letter, I told this guy that he just proved once and for all what a bunch of liars they all are. Its hard to imagine what they were thinking to call their loyal customer base (those of us that complained) only to tell them that we are being left out of the price correction. If I was angry when I wrote the letter in the first place, I was furious after this call. I'd just received a kick in the balls by Nissan. They'd have been better off not calling me at all. It is absolutely disgusting that big auto in Canada can screw their customers by 10's of thousands of dollars on each vehicle. The level of greed is just shameful. If only people would hold off buying their new vehicles for a few months, and dealership lots were overflowing with unsold cars, things would change for all of us.
