Ignore the fine print at your own risk!
Posted on February 20, 2009, under Car Financing.
The devil is in the fine print. Ever notice how all the meat of an advert is generally given just 5 seconds of airtime while the remaining one minute or so, or however long the commercial is supposed to be is filled with glorifying specimens of ad copy, fascinating, dazzling visuals and sounds featuring revved up engines, sleek lines of the car body, pretty girls and the like? This text or fine print is actually the matter of the advert that holds the information you require to cut through the shimmer of an advert and reveal the true sense of the deal or scheme.
Every year thousands of car buyers make the mistake of not properly going through their deal papers when buying a car or taking up a car lease or entering terms of chattel mortgage and hire purchase and end up paying more than what they calculated even after taking the scheme or sales offer into consideration. Each time, there is a fraudulent or misled car purchase made, the image of the auto industry takes a beating notwithstanding the number of fine dealerships we have in the country.
I can’t stress the importance of reading the fine print enough. It is where you must pay attention and figure out what’s going on. All the rest of it will not matter if you do not understand the tiny print at the bottom of the car lease agreement. The difference between a smart car buyer and someone who is negligent and careless about the way they conduct business and buy cars is primarily because of the importance given (or not) to the fine print that accompanies car leases.
How important is this stuff? Let’s put it this way: In September 1999, the Federal Trade Commission fined Mazda $4.05 million, the largest civil penalty ever from the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection in the United States of America, for messing around with the fine print in its TV lease ads and not making things crystal clear to the customers as they ought to be.
The Mazda ads flashed the information concerning security deposits and the total amount due at lease-signing in print that was too-small, for too short of a time, amid distracting sounds and images, says Sally Forman Pitofsky, a senior attorney at the FTC. She called the ads “deceptive” because the company was banking upon the customer reluctance to read the fine print and also encouraged the use of disturbing images and sounds to nullify the effect of the small print. So that the message in the small print was effectively suppressed by using diversionary tactics.
“Consumers may have been misled as to what was actually due at lease-signing,” Pitofsky says.The rules differ in their details for auto leases and loans, but the underlying idea is the same — if a dealer brags about one part of a financing deal, the other parts have to be revealed, too.
