As we’ve been in the habit of collecting horrible car dealer experiences lately, let us also take a moment to remember that customers can be every bit as bad. Case in point: this text message exchange between a dealer and a would-be Volkswagen GTI buyer that devolves into a missive of poorly-spelled insults. Human beings — they’re awesome!
The text exchange below comes to us from “MB,” a longtime car retailer and car guy who wanted to share with us one example of how nasty customers can be. An inquiry over a 2005 VW GTI VR6 turns into a dispute over how many valves that car’s engine has, and things go south from there.
Way south.
Here’s the exchange. Click the magnifying glass in the upper left corner to expand the photo.
It’s like VW Vortex — in text message form!
A quick reminder: plenty of engines have multiple valves, and four valves per cylinder is a very common setup. There are two variants of the 2.8-liter six-cylinder VR6 engine used in the old MK4 GTI. One had two valves per cylinder, and then it was later upgraded to a four valve design (which this GTI would have had by the 2005 model year.) Two times six is 12, and four times six is 24.
The VR6 never had a 16 valve setup because that is mathematically impossible with this particular motor, unless they used some sort of mixed-valve per cylinder setup. Which they didn’t. Had he “typed it in Google,” our angry friend the buyer would have figured this out.
Even so, this whole argument is so incredibly stupid because MB had the exact car the buyer was looking for — a 24-valve VR6 GTI. If he hadn’t lashed out like an angry forum idiot hell bent on winning an incredibly stupid argument, and acted with a bit of civility, he could have had the car he was after. Alas, that’s not how this went down.
Is there anything worse than a wrong person who’s convinced they’re right about something?