Ok, So i went to Car Hop on a friday afternoon in October 2008 because i desperately needed a car and i heard that they "help" people like me. In my case i didnt have horrible credit but i didnt have $1000 for a down payment which most dealerships require around here. I walked in with a friend of mine and a nice guy came right up and greeted us. He explained that Carhop's mission is to help people bebuild their credit and let them drive a "decent" car (yeah, right) in the process. So i agreed to listen to his sales pitch about how "carhop puts warranties on their cars regardless of miles", and so on and so forth. I agreed to start the application process (which took 2 1/2 hours to do) Long story short they pulled up two cars: a 1999 Taurus and a 1997 Escort. I picked the Taurus even though it was missing the antenna and the parking break cable was hanging down. Then when signing everything i realized im paying $7400 for a 1999 Taurus with almost 150,000 miles on it. But i already was there for almost 5 hours so i went with it.
It ran great for about 2 weeks when the steering started to whine. I saw the power steering pump was low on fluid so i bought some and it ran fine for another 3 days until it started being stiff and hard to turn. I bought more fluid and put it into the pump. This time however one of the lines exploded and sprayed hot power steering fluid all over me. Now i was MAD. I went into carhop without even cleaning up first and i asked them what they were going to do about this. They said to call the number on the key tag and they should take care of me. Well needless to say, they didnt. They told me that the power steering pump wasn't covered by this so called "warranty" and that they would fix it but i would have to pay. i said screw it and i put a new one in myself. But that didnt fix the problem. It ended up being the entire steering rack that was shot. And it had been for a long time. And to top it off, the gas tank was leaking horribly as well.
So i called the warranty center again and they told me that it also wasn't covered. After asking them what the warranty actually covers i asked if they could just take the stupid thing off since it doesnt help me anyway and they said that they cannot do that.... Wait a second, isnt that illegal? Its my flippin money that im paying them and i dont want to pay for a warranty that isnt going to help me anyways.
So i gave up and bought a used steering rack from the junk yard, and new lines all around and that fixed the problem. So i spent $600, 4 months, and LOTS of food and beer for my buddies who helped me throughout the 4 months. Im stuck with this car for another few months and i can promise that this car will be gone as soon as i pay it off.
To sum it all up: DO NOT go to carhop unless you dont have a problem with spending ALOT of time and money on fixing the car throughout the 24 month loan. Keep in mind that these cars are the cars that the other dealerships didnt want and there is a VERY good reason for that.... these cars are near the end of their lives and Carhop makes their money on repoing these cars from people that know how much they are getting screwed...
