Latest news with #ToyotaDealership
Motor 1
16-06-2025
- Automotive
- Motor 1
Toyota Salesman Finds Thousands of Dollars of 'Missing' Keys. Now He's Exposing Dealerships for Failing to Give Buyers the Spare
A car salesman is calling out his fellow salespeople for not giving car buyers both sets of keys with their purchase. As proof, he shows the purported back room of a Toyota dealership. There are dozens of keys on a desk in the room. He claims these are all keys that go to cars that were already sold and says this is a direct result of the dealership dropping the ball on customer service. Get the best news, reviews, columns, and more delivered straight to your inbox, daily. back Sign up For more information, read our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use . TikTok account Cars 4 Sale (@toyota4sale) is purportedly run by a Toyota salesman. In a video posted June 16, he shows viewers a desk covered in key fobs. All the keys appear to be for Toyotas. 'What happens when the salesperson won't do their job and check for a spare key for the customer?' he says. 'This is what happens.' Next, he explains the significance of what the audience is seeing. 'We end up with thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars worth of keys,' the salesman says. 'There's even a key for a 2024 Toyota RAV4 Limited.' He attributes these 'missing keys' to a very specific cause: Lazy or negligent salespeople. 'There's no salesperson to give the keys to the customer. It's amazing,' he says. 'Just because they forgot to check or they don't want to check.' His post has nearly 215,000 views as of Monday morning. Do You Really Need a Spare Set of Keys? A missing second key is potentially problematic for a couple of reasons. The first is financial. A new car key can cost up to $1,000, depending on the make and model of your vehicle. Car owners have also expressed concern that the second key could get stolen or misplaced and later used to steal the vehicle. This would require the would-be thief to not only have access to the second key, however, but also to be able to track down the vehicle. Not having a spare could also strand you if your first key's battery dies or if it's lost or misplaced. That's why car owners generally prefer to have at least one spare. The difficult truth when buying a used car is that you may not always get two keys. That's because the car might've come into the dealership without a spare. If you're concerned someone may use a missing key to access your vehicle, you can ask the dealership to deactivate the lost key fob remotely. In the event the dealership can't or won't deactivate the key, you can also contact a locksmith to reprogram the codes that allow the fob to start the vehicle. An Expensive Mistake or a Money-Making Scheme? Trending Now 'I'm Absolutely Doing This:' Arizona Man Shares Little-Known Sunroof Trick to Stay Cool. Then He Slides It Open to Show Off 'Thought I Was Doing Him a Favor:' Woman Tries to Tow in Husband's Ram Bighorn. Then She Makes a Common Mistake One person who commented on Cars 4 Sale's post accuses dealerships of having a nefarious reason for retaining one set of keys: So they can charge the customer for a new one. 'And it's totally intentional so they can charge $600 for a new key,' they wrote. If true, this would be a sneaky way to make a buck. Edmunds reports that costs for replacing a basic key fob range from $50 to $100. For more expensive keys, such as a smart key, AutoZone says the costs can be as high as $1,000. Still, it doesn't seem overly likely that a dealership would run a racket of keeping one just to charge a customer for a replacement key. It's arguably more likely that dealers end up keeping a set because staff either didn't know there was a second key, couldn't find it, or didn't bother to check, as Cars 4 Sale suggests. Viewers Weigh In Several people who commented on the post agree that the problem is with the dealership's system. 'All spare key should be with all the paperwork/books who's gonna look for keys like that no one,' one person said. A second person agreed that the blame is misplaced. 'Sounds like a management problem,' they wrote. A third said they don't leave a dealership without a spare key. 'I won't buy a used car without two keys,' they wrote. Some people offered solutions to the stockpile of keys at the Toyota dealership. One suggested, 'Mail them to the customers. Take the cost out of commission.' Motor1 reached out to Cars 4 Sale via TikTok for comment. We'll be sure to update this post if he responds. More From Motor1 'Never Knew This:' Honda Civic Driver of 3 Years Reaches for Key Fob. Then She Realizes It Has a Little-Known Feature Tesla Fails Cybertruck Owners Again, Cancels Key Upgrade 'Why I Hate New Cars': Man Tries to Replace a Headlight Bulb on His 2022 Toyota Corolla. Then He Learns Something Unexpected It Sure Looks Like GM Is Copying Lucid's Homework Share this Story Facebook X LinkedIn Flipboard Reddit WhatsApp E-Mail Got a tip for us? Email: tips@ Join the conversation ( )
The Sun
04-06-2025
- Automotive
- The Sun
Toyota & Lexus new cars for 2025 revealed including rugged RAV4 update, hybrid Aygo and sharp-looking ES saloon
'IF you want to catch a lot of fish, set out many fishing rods,' a wise man in the motor industry once said. Toyota is definitely following that advice. 5 So any potential customer swimming into a Toyota dealership will find a huge range of cars ready to hook them. It's working. Sales of Toyota and its posher Lexus arm keep growing. A cascade of new cars and updates will likely keep the momentum going into next year. The RAV4 family SUV is a massive seller and returns next year as a plug-in hybrid only. It should be economical when running on petrol alone. But if you can find somewhere to plug in, the electric range is now a very handy 62 milles. The angular new body has a proper rugged look to it, standing out from the crop of softy crossovers it competes against. Toyota keeps driving down the cost of hybrids. At the end of the year it will relaunch its baby Aygo X as a hybrid instead of pure-petrol. That will have the lowest consumption and CO2 rating of any car without a plug. Toyota offers $25k discount off brand new model until June 2 – but the rebate depends on where shoppers live So the hybrid system is still a massive part of Toyota's success. When hybrid arrived here in the Prius at the turn of the millennium, it was a minority sport. Gradually it went mainstream, spreading across nearly all Toyota and Lexus models. So much so that the company took flak for not jumping from there on to the full-electric car bandwagon. Now that caution looks wise. The speed of changeover to EVs is softening, and the legal push to ban hybrids is paused five years to 2035. Shifting predictions for EVs are affecting Toyota-Lexus too. 5 For some years, the plan was to build standalone electric cars, wholly different from the hybrids. But that's going to change. Andrea Carlucci, European marketing boss, told me the plan now is to build cars that you can buy as either full-electric or hybrid. Selling completely separate hybrid and EV models, he says, 'causes a complexity challenge', confusing buyers and choking dealerships. 'We should simplify the number of silhouettes.' So Lexus is launching its sharp-looking new luxury saloon, the ES, in both a hybrid and a 330-mile electric. In the UK the plan is we'll get the electric only, but no doubt that could alter if the politics of EVs change again. Inside, it's luxurious but with a clean Japanese-garden feel. The door trim looks like back-illuminated bamboo. But despite the new plan for dual-powertrain cars, there are still a bunch of pure battery cars in the launch phase. The small one is the Urban Cruiser, on sale shortly. It'll be followed by the C-HR+, which looks, and is, different from the C-HR hybrid. All those two share is a general theme: both are compact coupe-crossovers. For families wanting more space as well as battery power, Toyota will add a Touring estate version to the bZ4X electric crossover. That's spring next year. The all-electric Lexus RZ gets an update next year, including steer-by-wire using an aircraft-style yoke instead of a steering wheel, plus fake 'gearbox' effects to make driving a single-speed EV feel more interesting. More like a petrol car, in other words.
