9-3-26 - 11am - Car Companies Pulling "Gotcha's" on Consumers

0:00Why you deal with listening to Armstrong and getting on demand? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring. And tedious. And depressing. And makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. About something about a comedic tone. What? We have a winner? Yes. Listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I have an email here. Let's see. It's um. I don't see your name on it. Rodriguez. A ride. Uh-oh. This is hi everyone. Well, it was a giveaway for your show Thursday. Check's calendar. That's today. producers, please send winners to this group. That would be you. I got the special forward from the dragon red beard. So I did. I did. Oh, you did. Okay. Yeah. This is please read along with the giveaway. Quote. Quote. When a pair of tickets to Garth Brooks this Sunday at ball arena.

1:04Dot dot dot. Mandy has another chance to win today between noon and three. She does. Let me know if you have questions. Thanks Dave Tepper. I don't have any questions. Do you have any questions? No. Okay. I don't do either. None at all. All right. So. I have an acquaintance in low places. His name is Michael Brown and I have to give away tickets now. I have a Garth Brooks story to tell you. Oh, I have somewhere in my in the end of close locations. And and some location where I keep all my other secret record. I have VHS tapes of Garth Brooks playing in stillwater Oklahoma before he became Garth the Garth Brooks because he and my cousin were best friends and he would just occasionally take his camcorder and video him. And I've got those tapes. But why is your cousin was best friend of a Garth Brooks? No, they were I didn't say best friends. I said they were friends. Oh, so when you would play I can't remember the name of the bar. There's a bar and still water. Can't remember the name of it.

2:04But anyway, they would they you know Garth would play there. And so my cousin Steve would go and you know record these. No. You know, what do you call him? When night stands that Garth would do. Sure. Tell us what's sitting somewhere in the end of close location. Are there worth anything? Do you know, would you buy him? I wouldn't at all. But I know Garth would. I'm not a country fan. Oh, okay. Don't like country. Well, we need to give these tickets away. We do. We do. Producer. So you're supposed to tell me how we give the tickets away. So how are we going to give the tickets away? Well, people really like to use your text line. I don't know if you would get enough entries on the talk back in the sense that I don't know if not people would sing like they did for us when we gave away Garth Brook tickets earlier this week on with Mandy. But people like Garth Brooks. But people also just like to text. So we can do right now. You want to do right now? We can do right now. Get it done with. Well, find you think I'm running up to get it done with. Yes. Well, let's see, it's 11 0 8 right now in the vein.

3:06Dragon Redbeard. Let's do. Textor number three. At 11 11. And then the text just say I love Garth Brooks. But we need and we need their email address, right? Sure. Yeah. Yeah, give me your name, your first and last name and your email address. And along with I love Garth Brooks. Third person to text with all that. So yeah, they a lot. They got to use the keyword micro Michael. Sure. I love Garth Brooks. My name is. Yes. Hey, Rod. Yep. And my email address is. It is what? Damn. And they want to do it. They have to be what? Third person to text all of that goodness at 11 11. All right. They that's enough. Now do their Garth Brooks. Damn. It's for the kids in the back of the room. Huh. Do we need to tell the instructions again? Sure. At 11 11. Text the word Mike or Michael. And then your first and last name and your email address

4:09and say I love Garth Brooks. And you will inform that person to save one. And then you will let the group know that who that person. Correct. A mundo. Look at that. You will actually do producer work. All of your friends in low places. AKA the goober since they're goober's of your show. Low places. Low places, baby. One of them is going to win some Garth Brooks tickets. Yeah. Well, not too shabby. And then as you said, the following show with the blonde woman that I also will be producing today as I do every day. We'll give away more later today. Aren't you lucky to be able to do the two greatest shows on the entire station? Lucky is a word. It is a word. It lucky is a word. Is indeed a word in English language. Lucky lucky lucky a rod. Lucky a rod. Yeah, I don't think you were I don't think you were on with me yesterday when I did this story. Were you with me? I do the story about the heated seats. Was that the first hour thing was in the first hour? Was it the first hour you didn't have the first hour now?

5:10So I told you the story about heated seats. About the morning that I realized the company that built one of the cars of my garage had spent a year and a half testing whether it could sell you the car and then rent you back the switch on your own heated seat. And at the end I asked you to text me. I asked you to tell me about the feature and something that you already own that turned out to have a landlord that you never met. And you did. And one of them just caught me completely off guard because it takes everything I said yesterday drags it out of the abstract and parks it right no pun there and parks it right in a real man's a real goober's driveway. Here's the text. I'm going to read it for you word for word. Quote. Michael. Probably about to go to war with Acura or a subscription to use the recent most start in my MDX.

6:10I was sold this model over one without as many features. It was never disclosed to me verbally that after three years I would have to pay a monthly subscription. I think some lawyer could make a mint with a class action against all of these crux close quote. Okay. That's that's what held the text. One you were listening to you fit the example even better than I did because my car company the MW backed off completely said no we're not going to do that. That's really bad marketing. But Acura I guess didn't quite get the message. So let me take this apart the right way because there's three separate things going on inside this text message and if I blur them together you'll lose the argument to the first smart person that ever approaches you about this. There's the fee. There's the lie of omission and then there's the lawsuit that he's dreaming about.

7:11So three different animals let's take them one at a time. Let's murder them and then do an autopsy. Get into the machinery because the machine reads where the truth is hiding. Let's start with the fee first. And let me start with me being honest to his my own interest too. The remark start on your phone is actually the hardest case for my side of this argument because I told you Wednesday I was going to be the guy who screams that every subscription is a scam because the minute you over claim what's what you're going to lose you hands somebody else the win. Here's the honest line. There are two completely different ways a car does remote start and they're not the same thing under the hood. The first is the key fob that's in your pocket. That little plastic remote is actually a short range radio. You push the button. It throws out a low power signal. A receiver in the car gets that signal and the engine turns over.

8:13That's it. The whole conversation happens across the parking lot. When I take him the dogs in the winter on a hike or walk somewhere I know just about how far away from the Jeep the dog will be like and be where I can click the keker the fob and get the car the Jeep to start whatever I know that's just one example. The whole conversation as I said between your fob and the car happens across the parking lot. Maybe a couple hundred feet directly between the fob and the car. No internet no servers no cell tower nobody where pays a monthly dime for that to happen. That's kind of like a garage door opener with a fancier fob right? But the second way is the app on your phone and this one is a different beast entirely. When you tap start in the app from inside the grocery store that command doesn't go to your car. It can't it can't make its way through all of the cereal aisle.

9:16It can't make it through the wine and cheese aisle. It can't make it through anything. That command does not go to your car because it cannot go to your car. Your phone can't shout that far so it goes up to the internet or to the car companies computers and those computers in the right back down through the cell towers to a little mold in this built-in here of vehicle. Your car has its own phone line, its own SIM card, bury in the dash quietly connected to a cell network every second of the day. That's how the app can start your truck from three miles away or from your kitchen or from another state. And that cellular connection costs the car company money every month real money for as long as you own the car. So when your accurate charges you for app-based remote start, they are at least renting you something that genuinely keeps costing them something. And that fee by the way runs about $110 a year once the trials up from what I could find. Your mother's may vary. Of all the things to put a meter on,

10:19that's that one I think is closer to fair than the seat heater ever was. And I say that out loud because it's true and because I wish you trust me when I get to the part that isn't fair because here's the part that isn't fair and I think it's a beauty. Cars? Yeah. Me's pretty good. He's a very good voice. He does have a good voice. I can give him. Now what do you what do you not like about him? The lifestyle, the personal life, the songs, the music? What is it? Is genre music? Oh, okay. The genre. But you like that song. You just do like that song. Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple one off country songs I can get behind. Red solo cup, friends in most places, nine to five with dolly RIP. Okay. There's not many. Well interesting. Let's select few that are just so noteworthy in pop culture. They're kind of an earworm that I can get behind. Yeah. That's one of them. That's probably one of the top ones that I can enjoy. And it's really good

11:19when a whole bar is singing it really drunk late at night. Which is now the culture. That's the right. And can anyone get a little voice? Yeah. So what genre is that the only genre? Only one that I do not like. So I told you that mine is and I'm not sure which definition fits properly. So you're the age that can define it for me. I said I'm not sure whether it's called hip hop or rap. But it's basically the kind of the original rap. Not much instruments. Not much instruments. Not much instrument. Basically just, you know, a bunch of gang symbols and, you know, jerking around and some that's pretty much just like, yeah, like pure rap. Even Eminem. I mean, you know, it's not just, you know, I'm an am. Oh, now we got a problem. I mean, come on. You know, I've had a problem long before Eminem. You're not like Eminem. A lot of people got a problem with you. Eminem is fantastic. I think it's one of it's not the best rappers that there ever was. But is that is Eminem equivalent to what I keep calling the original rap? Is

12:21that or is that you put that in a different? I would say he's hip hop. He's hip hop. I mean, he's, are you googling this all we're talking? I'm carrying what they're, what their definition is, rap is the vocal style of speaking words rhythmically. And hip hop, I guess is the broader culture. And like the musical genre that includes rap is how, right? So what's my, so then what's the, if somebody asked me what genre do I not like? I think, I think you're going to say rap, because I think hip hop is more of a movement. Not just the music. No, no, okay. All right. So I think you just don't like rap. So in other words, yeah, I've been right all along. Sure. You can think that then you say things like I don't like Eminem. And then I'm like, well, I got nothing for you at that. That's just called being wrong with a capital double. Just wrong. Just wrong in your book, right? Yeah. Well, Eminem's awesome. All right.

13:23Um, no, no, no, okay. No, no, there's not. In fact, I don't think there's, I don't think there's any, but I would just call it rap song. I wonder what I'm going to bump back with coming back. Oh, Lord. You did this yourself. Oh, Lord. All right. We're going to get back to the car next, back to the cars. So the, if you're fog, we'll remote start your car. Fine. But here's the parts I think unfair and I did in this one's a beauty. Toyota did the same thing to the key fob. The first time, the dumb radio in your pocket, the cost them nothing. You know, just, yeah. But let me say it again, because when I first saw this, I had to read it twice on a lot of Toyota's built since 2018. The remote start button on your physical key fob. Will not work unless you are paid up on a subscription, not the app on your phone, the fob itself.

14:32So the garage door signal that never touches the internet, never peeing the server, never cost Toyota, a nickel. They put a software checkpoint checkpoint between your thumb and your engine. You push the button and before the car obeys the signal, it stops and asks the question, is this fog paid up? And if the answer is no, your own key fob sitting in your own hand, already paid for and full, talking to your own car, gets told to pound sand. Now Toyota, I'm not guessing Toyota, I'm going to that in plain English. Their own spokesperson said the vehicle has to be enrolled in a valid subscription in order for the key fob to start the car remotely, eight bucks a month or nice discount, you spend 96, you get it for 80 a year. Ask for the free trial runs out to use a button on a remote that you already own, sending a radio signal that is free as the air that travels through. That is the dire ballgame right there. That's the toll booth that I was describing yesterday,

15:36except now it's not bolted to a seat heater. It's bolted to the little black remote in your pocket. Wow. The howl though is the important part. Somewhere around 2018, 2020, I don't know. Nearly every new new car quietly got that built in modem that I told you about. That always on cellular connection. Now the car company sold it to us as a safety feature. It's like every, it's like gun control, a safety feature. They sold it as a safety feature. And some of it might be automatic crash notification. The car calling for help in the airbags go off, stolen vehicle tracking. Good things. I'm not against any of those, but once every car on the lot has its own live internet connection, something changes for the company that you and I did not fully clock at the time. Now everything in the car can be switched on and off from a computer in

16:38Michigan or Tokyo. Every feature becomes a valve they can open or close half a world away. The hardware is all in there. Every car built the same fully loaded on the assembly line and then the software decides what you're allowed to use based on what you paid for this month. There's actually a name for it in the auto industry. Features on demand or functions on demand. Sounds like a menu, doesn't it? Well, it's a meter and Wall Street loves it because the company that sells you a car once. That's worth a certain amount. But a company like, oh, I don't know, Gillette, a company that sells you a car and then builds you every month for the next 10 years, that company gets a much prettier number next to its name and its two words recurring revenue. That's the phrase. They're turning the vehicle. The car you drive to and from,

17:41work to the grocery store, the doctor, whatever, don vacation. That now becomes a subscription. Exactly the way the cable company turns your television into a subscription. There's one more piece of this big giant ugly machine. That little modem in your dash doesn't just take orders. It talks. It sends info back earlier this year, the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission. They finalized a case against GM and its on-star service. Their finding was that GM collected the precise location and the detailed driving behavior of millions of drivers, how fast you were driving, how hard you hit the brakes. And then they sold that. They never got a real informed consent from the people in the cars. Then that data ended up in the hands of companies that feed into the insurance industry. And then some people found their rates went up and they were like, why? We don't know. Why did I go up? The FTC's remedy was to ban general motors from selling that

18:44location and driver data for five years. I tried to find out what happened in the six year. Nobody knows because the agreement was for five years. You can't do it for five years. So now let's go around the whole circle. They build the connection into your car. They charge you a subscription fee to use the features that ride on that connection. And then they turn around to make money a second time by selling what that same connection learns about you. You pay to send the signal out. They get paid for what comes back in. It's the only told booths I know of that charges you in both directions while you're going in one direction. Oh, when you go through in the 470 toll things, read your little tag. Well, they charge you both directions even though you're going west or only going east. Now, that's good. That's the one piece of the machine. That's the fee in the machine. Now the second animal. And this is the one where that texture is spot on. His real problem isn't

19:46$110. His real problem, I think, is that nobody told me that was the deal. He says he was sold the more expensive MDX because of its air quote here features. So he picked that one over a cheaper one because it did more. And then three years in one of those features that he paid extra for turned around and started asking him every month, Hey, I need some mula. I need some money. The ever did one person at the dealership ever look him in the eye and say those words out loud. By the way, sir, this feature has a clock on it and it expires. That is not a subscription problem. That's a truth and advertising. That's a true tell the truth problem. And I think that's actually the strongest part of the whole of the entire text. Now, the company will tell you all the we disclosed it. Now without saying another word, let me just say, I know I know what I'm going to

20:48say, but I want you here in the different way. The company will tell you was disclosed. And if I not done the research, my answer to that would have been, I bet they did. I really bet they did. And you know what? The company's probably right. It's almost certainly written down somewhere. Maybe in the stack of papers you signed at the finance desk or in the owner's own portal or it's in a terms of service. You know, the TOS is a terms of service document that's 40 pages deep that nobody on God's degree knows. There's ever read starts to finish. Well, maybe accept me. So they did not hide it in a legal sense. They hit it in a human sense. They buried it where a real person living a real life. Happy to have a brand new car was never going to find it until the bill showed up. And the trial period. That's the sneakiest cleverest part of the entire

21:52operation. Think about the timing. They give you the three years free long enough that you forget it's not even a question long enough that your way past the day you could have walked back into that lock, picked a cheaper car instead. By the time the meter starts running, you're not a shopper with options anymore. You're the owner. And then after three years, you've got to have it. You've been starting that truck from your kitchen window every cold morning for three years. And now they got you and they know it. The free trial, generosity, bull crap. That's the setup. Now that gets us to the third little animal in this story. The lawsuit. The texture says, a lawyer can make a mint with a class action against all these crooks. Okay, let me put the blogger hat on. And let me tell you the honest lay of the land here. And then I'm going to riff on the guts of it because this is where it gets really interesting.

22:54Here's what a class action even is in the simplest terms I can think of. One person or maybe a few, they stand up together and they say, this didn't just happen to me. It happened to everybody who did X. In this case that X happens to be, it happened to everybody that bought this car. So let's see on behalf of all those purchasers at one time. The whole point is that no single person is going to hire a lawyer and go to war over $110 a year. It's just not worth it. Hills bells, the $110 might bite might buy you a quarter of legal work. And that's probably on a cheap side. But $110 times 400,000 owners, now you got a case big enough. That a lawyer will actually get off his ass and talk to you about it. To get a class action lawsuit going though, the law makes you clear some hurdles, some bars. No, not the kind you drink in

23:57hurdles. Think about a racetrack hurdle. You got to have a lot of people, enough that you couldn't just sue individually. You need a common question. Something that is literally, if I do mean literally the same for everybody in the group, you need the people who are leading the class action lawsuit to be very, very typical of the entire group. And you need to represent the entire group, everybody in that group fairly. Those are just the bare bones of a class action lawsuit. And for a money case like this one, you've got to show that the common questions actually outweigh all, all every single one of the little individual differences between one buyer and the next buyer. In other words, there's got to be a singular, imagine a really tiny piece of thread. It starts with one person. And if you have a class of, let's say, 10,000 people that one thread has to remain the same going through all 10,000 people.

25:04And that common question, you've got to show that the common question, that thread actually outweighs all the individual little differences between the first person and the next and the next and the next and the next. And the theory of the case would not be that subscriptions are illegal. Because they're not illegal. They're totally fine. Charging a subscription for something is perfectly illegal. You pay for subscriptions all the time. The theory would have to be that the automaker and the dealer, because I'd include the dealers in it too, that they deceived you, that they failed to disclose something. To more words, they failed to disclose something that mattered. Something that would have changed your decision, could have, would have, might have changed your decision at the moment you were signing the contract. Now, every all 57 states have a consumer

26:11protection law built for exactly this kind of thing. Colorado's got one. The Colorado consumer protection act, this happy trade practices. That's the door you're going to be walking through. So I know everything right now. I hope it sounds like a slam dunk, because it's not. I just want you to think it is. And I want you to understand why, because this is the parts that are going to make you mad all over again. Two things are in your way. And the first one is the big one. It's buried in the paperwork that that person, that listener, that purchaser, signed the day he bought his truck. It's called an arbitration clause. Nearly every car purchased contract, every financing agreement has got one. You never read them. I do. And what it says, and I'm not saying I do because I'm better. I'm just saying I do because that's what I'm trained to do. I'm like a trained seal. I'm a trained monkey. I'm trained. I'm trained to read. In fact, I have a little dispute. Not a dispute. I have a question going on with a co-worker.

27:11And what happened was the co-worker sent me an email. It said, starting such and such, we're going to do X, Y, and Z. So I read it while I was sitting here. And then I got home. I read through the entire email chain. And that's where I went ballistic. Because now I realize that oh, up here. See, that's why I read arbitration clauses. I want to know where do I have to arbitrate? How does the arbitrator get picked? Nothing I've never been an arbitration, but never over car purchase. What that says in effect is that you agree never to take us to court. And you especially agree, you specifically agree never to join a class action against. You agree that if you got some sort of beef, you'll take it alone when the legion against the giant corporation into a private arbitration room where the company picks the field and the deck is built the way they want it to be built.

28:12Now you might think, well, a clause like that can't possibly be enforceable because that's outrageous. The Supreme Court says it is. In there's a case, AT&T mobility versus conception. Back in 2011, where the court held the these class action waivers that get stuffed into arbitration clauses are enforceable and that state laws trying to protect consumers from those arbitration clauses get swept away the minute you sign it. So before your class action even gets out of the parking lot, the company walks in, waves the paper, you saw him knowingly signed and says, your honor, he gave up the ride at the finance desk. Now I would say that 99% of the time ball games over, you're done, you're at the bottom of the ninth and you just struck out. But the second thing is a little more subtle. And it's actually the disclosure point turned against you. So to be able to sue as one big group, everybody's got to be in roughly the same boat. But what if the salesman told the fellow in the

29:16next town over what if it was on the windows sticker for some buyers and not for others? What if some people read the portal that some didn't? The company's lawyers are going to stand up and say, hey, your honor, every one of these sales was different. You can't lump them together. You'd have to hold 400,000 separate little trials about who was told what. And that argument that everybody stories a little different that alone can be enough to sink the entire class action before sales. And then I told you I was going to kill this one. Even if you get passed all of that, here's the punchline you probably know when you're gut. When these cases settle and they usually do, you get the little notices in the mail or email all the time. Watch your drives off in the new boat. The lawyers get their fees and cash up front and you, the wrong owner, the whole reason the case ever existed in the first place. Oh, you get a coupon. $10 off your neck subscription. That's what it usually is.

30:16Hey, you're right. You know, we're going to settle this without admitting any liability. We're going to pay the lawyers the $6.7 million in legal fees or the $100 million legal fees. And you're going to get a coupon that says, hey, you want to subscribe. We'll keep you 10 bucks off. That's the deal of voucher that you'll never redeem. I think I still have somewhere in my desk at home because I get these all the time. I always agree to it because I'm you know, because I want them to work. I want them to have to work through it. I think I've got to check somewhere in my desk for some class action lawsuit. That's for like 87 cents. That's really an 87 cent check. Oh, is there anything cash? I've got too much mileage out of that showing it to people laughing about it. And showing, hey, look what I don't know 18 or hell's mills. I don't know who it was, but 87 cents. Meanwhile, the lawyers are vacationing in, you know, Bali. So a voucher that you'll never redeem.

31:18Congress actually had to pass a law. It was called the Class Action Fairness Act to try to reign in exactly that coupon rack. And I just described. But it still goes on. So do I think that our texture is wrong to be furious, not from not for a nanosecond? And his instinct is right. Somebody's holds hold him a truck on features and then quietly tuned one of those features into a toll booth. But the Class Action lottery ticket that he thinks is going to make him whole. No, the lawyers will make them mint. He gets a coupon. That's usually how the movie ends. So what actually fixes it? Nothing lawsuit. They like a simple law that says when you sell somebody a car, you must tell them in writing right there on the window next to the price, which features come with the car or which ones are so called rented and for how long are they rented? Not buried in the portal, not 40 pages in the TOS's on the sticker, add in the sunlight before your pan ever touches

32:25the paper. Otherwise do this. Michael Brown, 4695 South Monica Street Denver, Colorado, 80237. Send me your 87 cent checks. All I want cash on. We'll just make a gigantic Instagram photo of all of them and put them up. Why are you dealing with listening to harm, strong and getting on demand? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring and tedious and depressing and makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world about something about a comedic tone. We have a winner. Yes. Listen to Armstrong, you get a on demand on the iHeart radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.