File this under "you've got to be kidding me"

I'm still in love with my car but I've lost a lot of love for the whole process which has been a total and utter pain in the ass. I can understand completely why so many people were unhappy every time I went in to the dealership I purchased from.

It started the day I was on the lot and was looking at the cars. You would think that I would have run that day but I didn't. I really wanted this car and I was willing to put up with it. Who knew how much crap I would put up with. The saleswoman came running out to me when I was out looking at cars. I made a couple of comments about the 2009 Hybrid and the saleswoman was telling me the 2008 was the exact same car...uh no, but thanks. So she says to me...where did you hear all this information? Um, the Detroit Auto Show, in GM's press materials? Still didn't believe me. And her whole attitude was really not going far enough to keep me on the lot. It speaks volumes about how much I really wanted this car.

I went in the next day to order the car. She had a whole pile of information, did she read it? No. Did she have the information I wanted? No. One of the things that really ticked me off was that I wanted the Titanium leather interior but she just wrote down leather interior which lead to the factory just picking the colour for me. Why would this upset me? I paid an extra $1500 for this option for starters.

A couple days later I got a beautiful thank you card for the order...with my name spelled wrong. Which, ok, I can kind of understand if you spell my name wrong if I just say it to you, but it was on my order and she had to look at the address on the order and the name was right above it. Added to that, if you're going to go to the trouble of sending out a thank you card, at least go to the trouble to spell my freaking name right. It's called customer service, look into it.

After about two months I sent her an email asking about the status of my car. Turns out, she didn't have any info. I had to go through a contact at GM with the order number. They found the car. Suddenly, an hour later, she found the car.

Weeks went by and it was time to do the paperwork. I had to do all the leg work for the licencing, the ownership, the insurance, the lease termination etc. I didn't have time for that. Added to that, the saleswoman had little to no interest in doing anything but giving me exasperated emails and phone calls in answer to my concerns. She had absolutely no interest in helping me out or making this easy. I had to beg to be accomodated on the Saturday morning.

I finally got to the point where I just decided enough was enough, I'll just get the car and get it over with. There was a woman in the dealership crying hysterically over the difficulties getting her car. I picked up my car and left. Done. No more worries, no more hassles.

Except not really. She had spelled my name wrong again on the owners manual package so I see that every day. Then I got in my car three days later and realized I had the wrong colour leather interior. I got the cashmere instead of the titanium. Added to that, I wanted the sun roof but didn't get it either.

I know it sounds awful that I'm so nitpicky but this is not a little purchase. To me, this is an expensive luxury item. I invested six months of research on it. I worked hard to get it and I got really excited about it. This was important to me. The fact that there was so little interest in making me happy really spoke volumes about the customer service.

So when the customer service call came in to me that night I unleashed. Not yelling and screaming, just outlined what I was unhappy about and how awful I felt and how I would NEVER recommend Saturn of London to anyone in the future EVER.

Three days later my saleswoman called me to "clear up a few things". Just that alone really ticked me off. So I called her back and let her spin for a bit. She gave me all these excuses and made me feel bad for complaining. And when I pointed out what she did wrong, she insisted I was wrong that she hadn't done anything wrong. You can imagine how upset this made me. To say to me "well I didn't spell your name wrong all the time" and all of the other items really just put me off. So I finally cut her off and just told her flat out, her phone call was making it worse, her sales tactics were apalling and she was ridiculous to think that it would be ok to call me up and pretend to apologize and then make me feel bad for expressing how I felt. She didn't like that either.

The whole situation really left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I love my car. I am very happy with it, but I consider that GM's work, not hers. What she did and what happened at the dealership was just disgusting and I am going to be very careful in the future.