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Woman Buys SUV At The Dealership. Then They Install A $700 GPS Device On It—And Make Her Pay For It

"We can’t uninstall it."

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Photo by: Unsplash.com

JT Wilson

By: JT Wilson

Oct 10, at 6:00pm ET

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An Ohio woman says an Indiana dealership charged her for a GPS device she had refused after staff told her they had taken it off her contract. She says she only got the money back after writing to Indiana’s attorney general.

Katie's (@katiechik) video, which has been viewed over 2,350 times, is captioned, “Please don’t make me write a letter to the attorney general.”

A few years ago, she says, she went to Indiana to trade her sedan for an SUV. “Specifically, the dealership was Napleton, which I mentioned this because it’s important to the story,” she says.

She says they agreed on the car and the price, but the contract came with add-ons, including paint protection and a GPS device the dealership had already installed.

“I’m like, 'I don’t want you to have a GPS device on my car,'” she says.

Can Dealerships Put A GPS Device On Your Car?

She says that staff told her it couldn’t come off.

“I’m like, 'What do you mean? Isn’t it just a software?'” she says she questioned.

When she said she wouldn’t pay for it, “they’re like, 'But it’s already installed, and we can’t uninstall it,'” she recounts.

After going “back and forth, I mean, for hours,” she says, the dealership agreed to drop the fees, while pushing her to wrap up because “it’s getting late,” and “the banks are closing.”

Katie says she drove home to Ohio and went through the paperwork. “They literally told us they took it off, and then they just added it to another part of like the 50 pages of paperwork that they gave us,” she says.

She remembers the GPS “being like very expensive, like $700 itself.”

In a response to a commenter, she wrote that the price had gone down at the dealership, “which is why I thought it was taken off” and that staff showed her paperwork with the charge “removed” from the section where it first appeared.

Indiana’s Attorney General Gets Involved

She says she called the finance manager, the sales managers and the owners, she says, and got “the run around.”

After looking up FTC rules on car dealerships, Katie says she concluded that “you’re literally not allowed to do what they were doing.”

When the dealership responded, she says staff told her they couldn’t refund her and didn’t know how. “I’m like, 'Write me a check. Like, I’ll give you my address,'” she recalls.

So she says she wrote to Indiana’s attorney general, which wrote back to say it was looking into it. “Within like probably two weeks of me sending that letter, I had a check in the mail,” she says. The office’s Consumer Protection Division says it “mediates and investigates consumer complaints against businesses” and sues companies that violate Indiana’s Deceptive Consumer Sales Act.

The Napleton Lawsuit

Near the end of the video, Katie puts up a screenshot of a 2022 FTC press release. “This is literally a lawsuit against this dealership,” she says.

The FTC and the state of Illinois sued North American Automotive Services, which does business as Ed Napleton Automotive Group, along with eight of its dealerships. Their complaint alleged that the dealerships “inserted charges for add-on products in these documents without obtaining consumers’ express informed consent” in closing paperwork that typically ran “more than 60 pages deep.” It cited a survey finding that at least 83% of Napleton customers “were charged for add-on products without authorization or as a result of deception.” One buyer said a dealership charged him for VIN etching he had turned down “and insisted that the charge could not be reversed.”

Napleton paid $10 million to settle without admitting or denying the allegations. The court order bars the company and those dealerships from “charging a consumer without having obtained the consumer’s Express, Informed Consent.” The eight dealerships were in Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Missouri—not Indiana, however, though Ed Napleton’s website lists several stores around Indianapolis.

Katie didn’t say which location she used. She says she thinks she “had a little bit to do with, you know, people getting their money back,” but the complaint doesn’t say what prompted the case.

The FTC is still warning dealers. In March, it sent letters to 97 dealer groups listing illegal practices that include “requiring consumers to buy additional items not reflected in the advertised price.”

‘I Would Have Walked’

Viewers shared what they would have done had they been in Katie's position.

“I would have walked”, wrote one viewer.

“I should have, because I actually ended up selling the car very shortly after,” Katie replied.

Another viewer was surprised by the length of the contract, writing, “50 pages? I signed the privacy statement, bill of sale, contract and GAP agreement. Maybe 15 pages.” The FTC’s complaint put the paperwork at the dealerships it sued at more than 60.

“These dealerships make people believe all dealerships act this way, and they don’t,” wrote another.

What do you think?

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Katie agreed, writing, “Some dealerships run a strict program and some do not. I can say that as both a customer and someone who worked in a dealership.” Her advice for everyone else is to “get good at writing, write a strongly worded letter, look up who you need to hold accountable and talk to.”

Motor1 reached out to Katie via TikTok direct message as well as to Ed Napleton Automotive Group. We’ll be sure to update this if they respond.

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