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Texas Plumber Sues Car Dealer After His Truck Ends Up In Videos of Syria's Front Lines (mashable.com)
New submitter hydrodog writes: A Texas plumber traded in his truck, which ended up in ISIS videos showing his logo and phone number. Now he is getting hundreds of harassing phone calls for 'supporting ISIS' and is suing the dealership for not taking off his information before selling it. He is seeking more than $1 million in damages. According to Mashable: "According to the complaint, filed last week, a salesman at the dealership, Edgar Vasquez, told Oberholtzer 'not to worry about the decal,' saying that peeling it off would 'blemish the vehicle paint.' 'At no time did Vasquez or any other agent, servant, or employee of the Defendant tell Plaintiff that Defendant would leave the decals on the truck, which would be transferred in some fashion to international jihadists conducting warfare upon innocents in Syria,' reads the complaint.
Applying Hillary Clinton logos and decals to my car and trading it in.
BRB.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/66d1d3ec-2f19-11e0-88ec-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3uLdcGolO
FTFA:
In a statement...Toyota added: “It is not our proudest piece of product placement. But it shows the Taliban are looking for the same qualities as any other truck buyer: quality and durability.”
That's a bold pivot to a positive message. Maybe the plumber can lean in and tell customers if he can put up with ISIS's shit, he can put up with theirs.
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A better question is how the hell this vehicle somehow ended up being shipped to the middle east where it could be sold to ISIS?
Because the dealership specifically stopped him when he started to do so, and promised to remove it themselves before they resold it?
That is very likely. Dealerships contract out people all the time to install pin striping and other specialty logos. Remember all those fancy graphics on Toyota trucks in the 80s? They didn't leave the factory like that, I worked in a dealership then. These guys know exactly how to remove the old sticks from other dealerships or company logos without leaving a film or scratch. The dealer just got lazy and wholesaled it out. It probably isn't illegal (although it probably was a lie), but it is very bad business.
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How is this frivolous? The salesman said that they would remove the logo because the former owner would damage the paint doing it himself and failed to do so.
My first thought was that he should have worried about the logo before selling it. Evidently, he did worry about it and was supposed to be taken care of by the dealership as part of the sale (trade in is a sale in its own right but was conditioned on the purchase of a different vehicle linking both )
Or at least that is the plumber's side of the story.
Whenever I see another one of those Daesh videos, I have always wondered where that rogue Toyota dealership is so we can wipe it out. Who know that it was in Texas?
If you have a somewhat successful business where you can afford trucks and employees, you could easily rake in 1M or more in a year. If your business goes bust or you have to invest into a media campaign or change your phone numbers or even a major decline in customers due to someone else's major fuck-up (if not plain illegal actions, trading with those nations in the US is strictly forbidden), 1M is not too little to ask.
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I think it's obvious where he'll be sending that million...
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I think it would be difficult to lose $1M in business over this. There is the set of people who have seen this video. There is the subset of those people who are motivated enough to connect that truck to a particular business. There is a further subset of people dumb enough to assume that this company necessarily supports Isis and/or is not able/willing to discover that the previous owner of this truck is not an Isis supporter. Then there are the set of people who are this company's current/future customers. What is the intersection of these 2 very small sets of people?
In 1997, Robert Fisk interviewed Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan, as described in his book The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. But first, he had to get there.
Because they are some of the most popular vehicles in Africa and the Middle East. I have a couple of Landcruisers* and people from Africa stop and talk to me when they see me with a nearly 40 year old truck still running fine. That's the brand's reputation back home as well.
*Older models, before Toyota yuppified them and screwed them up.
Have gnu, will travel.
What are you trying to say? That the used car dealer was dishonest?
Wow. What is the world coming to.
It's not ridiculously high. The man and his business's reputation cannot be restored to its former state and other than suffering a monetary slam, the dealer can do nothing to help with that.
How about the legitimate customers who were afraid to use his business because of what their neighbours might think? It takes a lot less than "Oh, is that the ISIS guy?" to kill a business in small town America. And what about the customers who tried to get through, but due to the hundreds of crank calls, couldn't get through and switched to another plumber, thereby losing current and future business?
Most small non-internet businesses are basically out of business without usable phones, and if this business is anything like my plumber, his number is stickered to every single piece of major work his company has done since 1984, and changing his number would undo all of that marketing effort. I'm certain I'm not the only one that calls the company that did the installation when I need service, at least if I'm happy with the original work -- Even if it's not a warranty issue, I know they deal with all of the brands of equipment installed, and they aren't going to claim the original installation was defective and charge me an arm and a leg fixing made-up issues with the original installation either.
$1M isn't much actual damages for current and future business, and some punitive damages would seem to be in order if the dealership failed to remove the logo as contracted, if that was part of the arrangement (which, admittedly, will likely be difficult to prove)
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
I don't worry so much about the decals, but it's bordering on irresponsible by the dealer to not remove the plumber's machine gun before reselling the truck.
LMAO Non paywalled link: Wade Hoyt, Toyota's spokesman in New York, who put the best corporate spin on the situation this week. "It is not our proudest product placement," he said. "But it shows that the Taliban are looking for the same qualities as any truck buyer: durability and reliability." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11... http://www.bloombergview.com/a... Top Gear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You can keep the Land Rovers.
The problem with European makes is that they assume that one is going to have a garage with the exact tools needed to do upkeep, the exact spec lubricants, and that everyone who works on the vehicle has been to the factory to take training and certification courses. The concept of a "shade-tree mechanic" is not in their playbook.
But in the real world, that can't be done often. In general, American and Japanese cars are engineered to be more forgiving if the right tool isn't in place. For example, on an old US brand pickup, the headlight assembly dim and faded. $50 later, I had a pair of OEM spec assemblies, and it took lifting a single lever and tugging on a cable to replace both of them. If I wanted to do that with the nearby German car, it would have cost thousands and required a shop visit.
Even a battery change. Chevy? Yank cables, pull out old battery, put new one in, put cables on, it starts. One European make, I found out the hard way that if the battery ever gets disconnected, the vehicle will not start and has to be towed to the shop for the battery to be "registered" with the vehicle's computer.
Nothing wrong with European vehicles. You buy a Mercedes, you pay Mercedes prices for parts and labor. However, European vehicles have no tolerance for oddball stuff. For example, one European make will void the warranty if more than 5% biodiesel is run. However, here in the US, it can go up to B20 without any notifications, with B10-B12 being the norm. So, pretty much, every make of that diesel vehicle has no engine warranty. Domestic brands can swallow B20, no issue.
His life and his family's lives, and his business have all been put at risk. Tell us why you think the amount is frivolous? Oh, you meant frivolously low.
Just another day in Paradise
You see it on MSNBC's commentary shows. Fox does it during their news shows. They were actually sued for this. It's not legal to pass commentary off as news. They successfully defended themselves by declaring they were not in fact a News Channel and were an entertainment network.
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