So this was another used vehicle purchase?
2025 1500 Ram SST Issues
- Thread starter Mathew_Boss
- Start date
So this was another used vehicle purchase?
No, original owner this time. It's a lease so I didn't even buy it luckily.
But it had some miles on it before you purchased it?
Used as a demo or a loaner vehicle before you bought it as a new vehicle?
Used as a demo or a loaner vehicle before you bought it as a new vehicle?
The salesman said it was a demo and that's why it had the added miles but the paperwork all says it was not a loaner or a demo and there is extensive repair history before we bought it.
“Extensive” is a subjective term. There is also nothing that forbids a dealer from selling a vehicle as new/demo if it has had prior mechanical repairs.
I have always suspected that just about every so called Demo, Loaner or Dealership Owners vehicle was really code for a vehicle the dealership had problems with. Really makes no business sense to take a new vehicle off the lot and press into Demo or Loaner status IMHO.
Your correct but mine had 5 in the first 1230 miles. 2 more after I got it. And we have another appointment Wednesday
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Naw, that's not been my experience. The dealership buys vehicles for employees to drive. These are everything from sales people to the owner. After a period of time, that vehicle is replaced and it gets sold as a demo. My first Grand Cherokee SRT was a demo, had been driven by the VP of the dealership.
Often times these vehicles are ones that are new or different that they want to move, so they have one "in the fleet" that they can show people and provide their experience on. I saw a lot of this with the various 4xe Jeep models for example, they had a couple of GC's and a Wrangler being driven by sales staff so that they could give real life experience on how they worked.
I still see it as a mechanism to dump and pass off misfit vehicle labeling them as such.
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
As I said, that hasn't been my experience, working closely with a dealership. I'm sure there are some that do that to some degree (not disclosing a vehicle having a problematic past during demo use), but I suspect the majority use the program in the same way my dealer does: vehicles for employees to drive and get familiar with so they are better able to sell them, and this would constitute the bulk of them.
In order for a vehicle to be a demo, it can't be registered. Which means it was owned, and operated by the dealer. So not a buy-back or anything like that. They are ordered just like any other vehicle, some of them are even just pulled off the lot and used for this purpose, but I can't see how a dealer using this program could intentionally leverage it as a method to, as you put it "dump and pass" misfit vehicles, as there is no way of concentrating vehicles characterized by that description within this program.
But that seems to be the case with OP's vehicle does it not?
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
If we don't consider the fact he's cursed? Sure, lol
. As he noted, there's conflicting information on it being a demo or not, which complicates things, but it's also not uncommon for TSB's to be performed either, so what exactly were the repairs? This is also a sample size of 1, so we don't know how that compares to the number of demos the dealership has had in the last year for example.UPDATE: it's going to a different dealership today for low coolant and to pull codes. Sorry the photo is so dark I forgot to take one yesterday. This will be the 8th time in its 3,600 mile life getting a repair.
Hopefully they get it sorted out. I had high hopes for that engine, they're slowly fading away. Hopefully they get the bugs sorted out for you. There's a lot of unhappy people out there with the 3.0L Hurricane engines from what I've been reading.
Did the fuel mileage ever return to normal?
Zee09
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Nope
Yeah this dealership said it was probably just an air bubble from the other dealership doing a water pump and topped it off. The water pump replacement was the auxiliary cooling system and this is the main engine block cooling system. They are not connected and have different water pumps and tanks. All these master mechanics and no one knows how this darn engine works
I work at a large Ram dealership. We have and have had many SSTs out as sales demos. Have yet to see one down, granted they are grounded and sold as demos at about 8,000 miles.
Have yet to see a misfit vehicle being dumped as you describe, after seeing 1,000s of vehicles sold.
If a vehicle comes back with issues after it was sold, I am amazed at some of the things we do for customer satisfaction.
Example - Original used vehicle was sold, had an issue with 2 weeks. Part to repair was back ordered, customer was in a loaner for well over a month. We don't leave customers high and dry, with new or used.
So are these demo vehicles being used as a tax write off for the depreciated value when sold?
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