Maximum Auto Search

My experience at Maximum Auto Search started off great. They had the specific car I was looking for and the price seemed to be somewhat reasonable. I filled out the contact form on their website and was quickly contacted by Adam and we agreed on a time to go on a test drive. There was really no pressure from Adam to buy the car and I spent a couple weeks evaluating other options and even went for another test drive with Adam. After that, I asked to take the car for a private inspection (a must for any used car), which was an easy process with them; all I had to do was sign a form and was able to take it for a couple of hours.



The inspection came back clean (other than needing scheduled service) and I negotiated the price with Cliff (the sales manager) accordingly. They weren’t willing to come down on the price very much, but when I told them I was leaving, they agreed to come up significantly on my trade in (which needed a lot of work).



I had previously lined up my financing, so I thought purchasing the car would be a quick process. Working with their finance people was terrible. It literally took me a half of a day to get the car purchased. They had no clue about how to do outside financing; they said they were able to work directly with Westerra Credit Union, which they then found out they were not able to do. This resulted in me having to drive to a Westerra branch to get the letter of credit. Once I got the letter of credit back to them, they claimed that they didn’t know what to do with it (it had pretty clear instructions for them on how to get the money on the letter). They also claimed that they could beat Westerra’s rate, but after running my credit, they said they were not able to beat it (I should have known better - now I have another credit inquiry).



Once everything was signed, they gave me the key (yes - one key!). In addition to only having one key, the key they gave me was broken and held together with a rubber band. When test driving the car I noticed the rubber band, but I figured it was from their key storage system or something like that. After complaining that I had just purchased a very expensive car (~$46,000) which only had one key, and a broken key at that, I was told by Cliff that Max (the owner of Maximum Auto Search) knew the previous owner and was going to get the other key from him. Replacement Mercedes keys are very expensive and if I had know I would have getting ½ of a key, I would had pushed harder on the price or just walked away from the deal before signing.



I’ve now had the car for about 4 weeks and Adam has stopped responding to my inquiries about the key. Up until this week he said they were in the process of getting it and he was going to get it for me. Now he’s unresponsive.