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'Did We Cost Ourselves?': Man Trades-In His Car. Then A Salesman Realizes They Didn’t Give Him Enough Money For It

"Would most dealerships do this?"

Man trades-in his car to dealership. Then a salesman realizes they didn’t give him enough money for it

Photo by: kmaauto1 & Ngampol

JT Wilson

By: JT Wilson

Apr 19, at 10:00am ET

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An Ohio dealership claims its sales manager called a customer back three days after a sale to tell them it underpaid for their trade-in and wanted to reissue the paperwork at a higher value.

The result, the salesman says, was a monthly payment drop of about $40.

Some commenters weren’t buying the story, but the dealership’s owner told Motor1, “We just wanted to make it right.”

KMA Auto (@kmauto1), a dealership in Marietta, Ohio, posted a TikTok about the situation. A text overlay reads, “Did we cost ourselves money here?” The caption asks, “Would most dealerships do this?”

What Did The Dealership Do?

In the video, the unnamed salesman walks across the lot recounting what happened.

“My sales manager just did something crazy, check this out,” he says. “We sold this deal on Saturday and these people had this trade-in that we looked at and we gave them I think $4,000.”

He says the manager came into his office a few days later and asked him to call the customers back. “Normally when that happens, that means that there’s something wrong with the paperwork and we got to have them re-sign or even worst case scenario interest rate change, payment went up or something like that,” the salesman says. “But in this case he was actually calling the customer back because we realized that we didn’t put enough money in their trade-in, and this actually ended up lowering their payments about 40 bucks a month.”

He ends by asking viewers whether any other dealership would do the same.

In a telephone conversation, KMA Auto proprietor Kevin Hall told Motor1 it was him who noticed what he called “just an honest mistake on our part.”

“We recalculated the trade and realized it was worth more money,” he added.

The Commenters Weren’t Convinced

The top comment, from B.H0401, offered the explanation most commenters coalesced around: “Let’s be honest. It wasn’t out of good faith. It’s because the bank needed the deal structured a certain way or they wouldn’t approve it.”

KMA Auto replied that both customers had credit scores above 780 and “could have bought anything they wanted to,” B.H0401 pushed back, “Credit score doesn’t affect how much negative equity they may have been carrying over.” The dealership responded that there was “zero negative equity.”

Other commenters didn’t buy the story at all. “The real option is this didn’t happen,” wrote Simplynader. “Alex. I will take something that did not happen for $600,” Bunk699 joked, referencing Jeopardy.

Soukeesrsr was harsh, commenting, “‘Normally we either screwed you over so bad initially and got caught’ or ‘we screwed up so we have another shot at screwing them over now.’”

Hall, the owner, countered this, saying, “It’s rare that a car dealership would make a mistake like this and call a customer back, but we wanted to make it right.”

Why Dealerships Call Customers Back

In other situations, getting a return call from a dealership can be bad news for a buyer.

The most-cited reason is what consumer advocates call spot delivery or “yo-yo” financing. This refers to when a dealership lets a customer drive home in a new car before financing is actually approved. Then a few days later, the dealer calls and says the bank rejected the original terms and the customer needs to come back and re-sign at a higher interest rate or monthly payment.

A less common reason, and the one the dealership claims here, is that the paperwork itself was genuinely wrong. Bourbondude_ made this point in the comments: “Yes, any dealership should be calling them back because it’s illegal and the paperwork has to be correct. Especially if you get audited.”

That tracks with how dealer compliance actually works. Trade-in values recorded on a sales contract have to match what was actually credited to the deal. Federal Trade Commission guidance and state dealer licensing rules both require accurate disclosures on trade-ins, and errors can trigger audit issues for the dealer regardless of which direction the error runs.

Undervaluing a trade-in can create compliance problems when it’s combined with other deal manipulations—for example, undervaluing the trade to quietly absorb a rebate that should have gone to the customer, or to hide an inflated sale price on the new vehicle. In that context, a dealer catching and correcting its own trade-in figure after the fact is a reasonable thing to do, even if the motivation is avoiding trouble rather than virtue. There’s no evidence that’s what happened here, however.

The monthly figure in the KMA video translates to roughly $2,400 over a five-year loan, which is a meaningful adjustment, but small enough that it could easily reflect a re-appraisal or a paperwork correction rather than a dramatic rescue.

What do you think?

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Comments

At least one commenter was willing to take the story at face value. “Kudos to KMA, haven’t heard of any other dealership giving same service,” wrote debbie102011.

Hall said, “We’re just an independent dealership that relies on making the customer happy. We rely on return business.”

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