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Dealership Remotely Disables A Car Over A $200 Fee (www.cbc.ca)
An anonymous reader quotes the CBC:
A car dealership in Sherbrooke, Quebec, may have broken the law when it used a GPS device to disable the car of a client who was refusing to pay an extra $200 fee, say consumer advocates consulted by CBC News. Bury, Quebec resident Daniel Lallier signed a four-year lease for a Kia Forte LX back in May from Kia Sherbrooke. Two months later, the 20-year-old's grandmother offered to buy the car outright when he lost his job and couldn't make his weekly payments. After settling the balance and paying a $300 penalty, Lallier said, the dealership told him he would have to pay an additional $200 to remove a GPS tracker that had been installed on the car...
Lallier said there was no mention of the removal fee in the contract and he disputed having to pay it."I just find it absurd that over $13,000 was spent on this vehicle and we still have to pay $200 more to have their device removed," he told CBC. After Lallier refused to pay the fee, a mechanic notified him by text message that his car was being remotely disabled until the dealership recovered the device and $200 fee. "I went outside and tested my car, and it wouldn't work at all...and I got angry," Lallier said.
Lallier had finally started a new job and was headed to work, according to the CBC. The president of the Automobile Protection Association says the dealership's action was clearly illegal, since once the balance is paid off, "it's not your car anymore."
Lallier said there was no mention of the removal fee in the contract and he disputed having to pay it."I just find it absurd that over $13,000 was spent on this vehicle and we still have to pay $200 more to have their device removed," he told CBC. After Lallier refused to pay the fee, a mechanic notified him by text message that his car was being remotely disabled until the dealership recovered the device and $200 fee. "I went outside and tested my car, and it wouldn't work at all...and I got angry," Lallier said.
Lallier had finally started a new job and was headed to work, according to the CBC. The president of the Automobile Protection Association says the dealership's action was clearly illegal, since once the balance is paid off, "it's not your car anymore."
A new business model: We'll remove that pesky fucker for only 100 bucks!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you leave your property within an item you transfer to someone else, you should pay, not be paid, to recover said item. The dealership should be sued for extortion.
He should sue them:
As this is Slashdot, I feel obliged to say my first action would be to find that device and attempt to remove it myself. I would keep that box as a trophy.
I can't help but feel like you completely missed the point of OP's post. GPS has basically nothing to do with this story, except for what the people that wrote it were referring to the device as. Immobilizer is the proper term. GPS is only a secondary function of it, and again, not relevant to this.
But he didn't agree. That's kind of the point. Also, once you sell a vehicle to someone else, it should be your responsibility to recover any items you may have left in it at the time of transfer. Trying to force the buyer into paying to return property he didn't even know he had is repulsive. The dealership should be sued into insolvency just for trying.
while it may be embarrassing, so is not paying the Bills you agreed to pay.
He had not agreed to pay.
His first action should be to file a criminal complaint for fraud and whatever they can make stick like some sort of "reckless endangerment" charge if he was on the road when it happened. "I'll see you in court" should start with the criminal and then go into the civil here if at all possible.
The land of the little guy who means nothing anymore, and the coroprations/comanies that can stomp on people unable to legally defend themselves in many, many instances.
Assuming you mean North America since Quebec is located in Canada...
Their toll free phone number is 1-888-258-7467
Time for an "inquiry" into their practices. If enough /. members call it will definitely cost them more than the $200.00 they did this for...
http://www.kiasherbrooke.com/fr/contactez-nous
You've confused GPS signals with GPS tracking devices. You're right that a GPS signal is not going to disable the vehicle, but GPS tracking devices often include the necessary cellular network hardware to provide remote disable capability.
So, yes, you can disable a car via the GPS tracking device.
Address of Kia Sherbrooke: 4339 Boul Bourque, Sherbrooke, QC J1N 1S4, Canada, So, no, not in California
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Actually, according to the documents I have on my new car, once I have paid at least 50% of the balance, it's mine and they can't take it from me. If they want to recover from there, they can only pursue me as per a normal debt.
After 50%, it literally states that it's legally my property. Sure, if I refuse to pay, they know I should have a car, but they can't just repossess it immediately. Before 50%, if I refused to make payments, they could disable it, recover it, just walk up to it with a manufacturer's key and take it - it's still theirs.
And it counts the deposit and the finance, so you actually own the car earlier than halfway through the payment term.
Now, it's a bog-standard personal car purchase, so I imagine that that's pretty standard for the UK/EU or that it's a statutory ruling that they have to abide by and tell you.
If a person owes you a bill, you bill him. Or file a mechanic's lein. Or sue him.
Breaking his stuff is not on your list of legal options. Because it is _his_ stuff. You have damaged his chattel and deprived him of the use of it. Doesn't matter if you had owned it at some time in the past.
Fucking brilliant plan. You fall behind on payments and they remove your ability to move around and have a hope of making the money. I bet they charge you for the privilege too.
Of course. And repo the car and sell/lease it again to someone else they hope can't keep up with the payments so they can do it again. And again... John Oliver did a good piece on the practice. IIRC one car had been sold 80+ times... A search for something like 'John Oliver car loans' on Youtube will probably find it.
You missed several points. The biggest one is ownership. Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner, so it is perfectly legal to disable THEIR car whenever they like. In this case, all agreed that the car was paid off. That means the dealership was illegally disabling someone else's car.
Next up, the first mention of the devices existence was when the dealer demanded a $200 fee to remove it. Nobody had agreed to anything about it at that point.
Yeah, because people in the US choose to have a trade policy that favors outsourcing jobs. Oh, wait, most are opposed to that. We even elected a President over it and yet the politicians STILL fight doing something about it. Or how people in the US choose to not have full time jobs that have benefits. Oh, wait, most newly created jobs are part time low wage positions that don't come with anything. Yeah, people totally choose to be like that.
Maybe, just maybe, the problem with health care is that we have private, for profit companies running it when health care itself does not obey the laws of the free market. Here's a few: nobody is forced to buy or sell (bullshit when you have a broken arm, or cancer, or something like that). Second, everyone has access to perfect or at least good information. Also bullshit. Need I go on?
The dream that the free market can fix something that so obviously doesn't follow its principles is what's stopping American healthcare from being fixed. The primary problem with Obamacare is that it left for-profit primary health insurers in business. We don't have a health care problem in the US. We have a health INSURANCE problem in the US. The problem isn't as the Sarah Palin crowd likes to say, the government getting between you and your doctor (though the war on pain treatment is a good example they'll never bring up)--the problem is that fatcats in business suits get between you and your doctor, or between you and any doctor. Doctors don't like it, patients don't like it, and it's bad for the economy.
What? Bad for the economy? How? Ever wonder why large corporations, which would stand to benefit financially from not having to provide health insurance as part of job benefits, are so opposed to actually fixing this problem? Why would a company be like that other than political stubbornness on the part of its leaders? The answer is control. Many people are stuck in jobs they hate just so they can have health insurance. If we didn't tie insurance to employment, these people would be a lot more free to leave. People who are free to leave are free to work elsewhere, to start businesses on their own, to employ others themselves if they do, and generally increase competition both in the product market and for employees. None of that suits the ultimate goal of large megacorps, which is to have a servile immobile low-wage workforce with no competition in the market. Think about that the next time you want to lay blame for all this at the feet of regular working people.
Yes. They would have used cellular communication for that. The disablers are commonly referred to as GPS devices since they provide GPS tracking info (also via cellular) to the dealer. It's just a short name for the thing, not a mis-understanding of the technology involved.
This was not a lease anymore. The car had been bought from the leasing company. That means unless they take things out, everything in the car belongs to the new owner. If they had put in a HEMI 6.5L engine that would be part of it, just as if the engine would be without pistons. The sale was done with the car as is. That includes the GPS device that now belongs to the new owner.
So it could be seen as breaking and entering into a private property.
Depending where you are, having a GPS without the person using the car might be illegal as well.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Asinine behavior like this is what inspires people to write up how to's for removing these things. Turns out a fair number of these how to's already exist.
http://www.instructables.com/i...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://trackimo.com/disable-g...
On they Facebook panic button "We assume you are leaving a negative review because of the recent news coverage concerning Mr. Lallier. It would be important to understand that the CBC has unfortunately mis-identified Kia Sherbrooke as the seller. The car was in fact sold by a third party. If, indeed you are leaving your review because of this subject, we ask you to please remove your review as Kia Sherbrooke is not implicated in the sale. We simply share the same adresse as the third party. We are sorry for the confusion this has caused. We are currently in contact with CBC to clarify the situation."
This was a lease. If it's a lease, it's still the dealer's car. Hence the whole reason the GPS was installed in the first place. It stops being the dealer's car once the dealer is paid in full. The naughty part is that the dealer probably didn't tell him about the tracker and the removal fee. The client should be informed, and the removal fee should be built into the lease price.
Wrong.
Canada is a Common Law country like most of the commonwealth. In fact their legal system closely aligns with the UK and most of the commonwealth.
If the vehicle is under a lease, the leasee is the legal owner responsible for insuring and taxing the vehicle. The vehicle is security for the leasor. If the lease falls into arrears, there steps permitted to be taken are spelled out clearly in law (and the lease agreement). The leasor is only permitted to take legal possession of the vehicle after it has been made clear to a court that the terms of the lease have been breached, I've got a leased car in the UK, the V5 and Registration is in my name, as is the contract with BMW Finance. A lease is not a rental contract, which is what you're thinking of.
Disabling the vehicle remotely is completely illegal and a violation of consumer rights.
However that is pointless because the vehicle in question was not under finance. The owner had paid off the finance, including the penalty and the dealer was trying to impose a C$200 extra charge for removing a GPS tracker. So the vehicle was completely under the ownership of the former leasee which gives them absolutely no legal cause to remotely disable the vehicle. This is extortion by the dealer, pure and simple.
Yes, I read the article.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
We also mock you for the atrocious health care you have because you can't afford to access it.
Wait until you can't make the monthly repayments on your wifi-enabled pacemaker...
That's like saying you can kill an elephant with a rolled up newspaper if you tape the newspaper to a rifle.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
These things are often installed with the knowledge of the user of the car, as a way to disable the vehicle if they skip town with it or stop making payments on it, and so it's installed with a similar level of covertness as is a lowjack or a car alarm. Not to say they're all "installed properly", but the idea is to put them in some nonstandard location, made to look like they belong, not in a location easily discovered by accident or even if you're looking for it, and almost always wired up in such a way that simply cutting it out will render the car disabled by default. You have to know how to "restore the connections to the engine/computer/starter after cutting the unit out, otherwise the car's computer, ECU, or starter won't work because some of its lines (that were bypassed during the installation of the device) were not reconnected in their normal/default way.
As an example, on my new truck, the aftermarket remote start/alarm I had installed has "memorized" my chipped key and that's the only reason it can remote-start start the truck. (since the key isn't present) If you cut out the alarm, you will have interrupted the lines between the computer and the ignition switch, and the car won't start for you because it can't see the key.
Any alarm/disabler that ceases to disable the vehicle when simply cut out is junk. They do exist. I've owned one in the past that installed a relay in series with the starter solenoid power, and was connected by default. Only when the relay received power would it disable the starter. The relay was turned on when the alarm was going off. So in that case if you cut out the alarm (or simply unplugged the connector block from the unit, if you could find it) then the kill relay would have no power and the vehicle would start just fine. That's a bad design though. Reminds me of the movie trope where there's a bomb or something that's attached to a timer and the good guys are trying to disarm it but run out of time before they can figure it out. So they just reach in and rip it out, and that disables the bomb. (Rei ripping out the compressor, Carol Marcus disarming the torpedo by ripping out the fuser, etc) Or any number of movies where shooting the security panel at the door unlocks/opens the door, or shutting down the power to the building unlocks the vault door. Despite what you've seen in the movies, that's not how they're supposed to work. This is the difference between something that's designed to 'fail-safe" vs "fail-open".
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
They probably DID roll the fee into the initial invoice, even if it wasn't explicitly mentioned, and are just trying to extort a little more money. But supposition aside, if it wasn't in the contract, then it wasn't in the contract. Case closed.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
CA = Califoria.
C Eh = Canada.
Sorry.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You sure can take back welds! ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You missed several points. The biggest one is ownership. Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner
That is not how it works at all! At least not in the US and I doubt it works that way anywhere else in the world. When you purchase a car, even if the manufacturer loans you the money, the car is yours. You do not own it free and clear. There is a lien against it, and that can be used to repossess the car, but it is yours until such time that you default on the loan and a court with proper jurisdiction authorizes the repossession of the vehicle. Now in this case, the vehicle was a lease and they may have additional rights prior to the purchase of the leased vehicle due to the fact that the dealership or manufacturer does own the vehicle in this case.
However, once they transferred ownership to him, with the GPS tracker installed, HE became the owner of the GPS tracker. The law is pretty clear that anything that is permanently mounted to the vehicle (as in you couldn't just detach it and walk away with it immediately) is the property of the new owner. So if it really is so integrated into the car that it takes $200 worth of labor to remove it, the tracker is his. Perhaps the dealership ought to have removed their property prior to handing the vehicle's ownership over to him.
That's just it they keeping lowering the entry credit scores to increase sales. Home sales are down to 1% down payments to increase sales of homes. The problem is with normal life debt the average salary of $50k a year isn't enough to purchase the average home price of $200k. So the banks and realtors are doing tricks to keep their sales up. Again. Except this generation has so much college debt in order to get a salaryabove $50k a year that they can't buy a home until they are 40 under the smart 20% down payment.
The same reason is why trade jobs are struggling. Trade jobs basically top out at 50-60k a year and that is just barely above poverty level in major cities and lower middle class elsewhere. We need a huge salary bump. Not a minimum wage bump but a median wage bump. That is something that hasn't happened in 40 years. And it is starting to drag the economy down.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
IANAL, but Sherbrooke is in Quebec, which follows Civil Law, not Common Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I know, I will turn in my card later...
The fee wasn't in the docs. The dealership asked for it after they sold the vehicle to him. The guy's mother (is he a Slashdot reader?) settled it with the dealership. The dealership removed the device at no additional cost.
I am guessing they forgot to remove their property and saw that the subcontractor (many times the service behind the hardware is someone else) would charge them ~$200 so they decided the pass on the charge. At this point, tough luck, deal was done. The user doesn't even need to return the GPS (service can be turned off), it kind of was sold with the car. The dealership should have asked nicely and gone to pick up their stuff.
Time to learn to read. I'll help you:
"Bury, Quebec resident Daniel Lallier signed a four-year lease"
When you lease a car, you don't own it. It's owned by a third party and you lease it from them. A lease is a rental agreement with a specified time period.
Oh silly me. I must have forgot how to read. Thank god I accidentally covered myself when I said:
Now in this case, the vehicle was a lease and they may have additional rights prior to the purchase of the leased vehicle due to the fact that the dealership or manufacturer does own the vehicle in this case.
They later bought the car.
At which time they became owner of the vehicle and all objects permanently attached to it. Like I said in my last post.
The device was likely on the car to facilitate remotely disabling the car if they got behind on lease payments, and should have been mentioned in the leasing contract. Since they were no longer bound by that contract due to the ownership change, they have no right to remotely disable the car. If the dealership has a smart lawyer they're already mowing the guy's yard, sucking him off, and asking how many 0's he'd like on the settlement check.
You're right, they have no right to disable the car. And it doesn't matter why it was on the car, only that they no longer own the vehicle or the tracking device. If they were in the US, I would certainly report this to law enforcement as an unauthorized use of a computer system as they clearly used a computer at some point to unlawfully disable the device.
Anything installed by the dealer attached to the car that requires tools to remove at the time of sale is conveyed with the car. One can make the argument that they illegally accessed his immobilizer system.
It doesn't even matter whether or not he could access or use the immobilizer, it was part of the car they sold to him, therefore it's his.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Unauthorized hacking. What's that, 20 years in prison? Oh wait, those laws only apply to plebes.
Really check your frigging outrage. This is market working!
This is all irrelevant. This happenned in Québec, and in Québec, we have the rule of law, and our law is far more reaching than US law, because we do not have common law, but the civil code, which is not precedent-driven (so the richest cannot purchase “justice”). And according to our civil code, what the dealership did was illegal, plain and simple.
The GPS part of the immobilizer is to help aid in repossessing the vehicle. It would suck to disable it then have to go hunting everywhere to figure out where the car was located when it got disabled. Of course, this should only be used lawfully for the contracted purpose of missed payments and repossession.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
"Surprising someone with additional fees at checkout time is a shitty business practice"
And you can refuse to pay.
Surprising someone with additional fees AFTER they've paid and actively preventing them from taking or using what they've already paid for is extortion.