Auto Europe In Birmingham MI

I had a bad experience as a potential buyer back in 1997, but that was over 15 years ago. Erik and his family have been in the car business for a long time, so my guess is that my situation was the exception, not the rule.

 

I lived in Birmingham Michigan in 1997, on Old Woodward in fact, across the street from the Mercedes dealership. If you know the area, it is an upscale mecca for car shopping. Along that short stretch of Woodward, there were Mercedes, Porsche, & Audi dealerships, plus Auto Europe and another collector car dealer that I've forgotten the name of.

The guys at Auto Europe knew me casually as a window shopper since I only lived a half mile from their location. I had a BMW E43 M5 at the time and sold it to a private party with the intent to purchase a pristine blue 1990 Porsche 944 S2 that Auto Europe had in their showroom. I was in daily contact with one of their salesmen while I got my financing arranged with the PNC bank that was right up the street. I made an appointment about 3-4 days after my initial contact with them to complete the purchase and pick up the car. When I arrived, my salesman started on the paperwork but then started to engage in stall tactics. He kept me waiting in the showroom for 1 hour (!) until he finally admitted that Eric had been negotiating in parallel with a walk-in customer that morning who also wanted to purchase the car. Eric's deal was the one that would go through, not ours, is what I was finally told. That left a bad taste in my mouth because they never asked me to leave a deposit on the car when we started the discussion a few days earlier.

That's my story. Nothing major happened, and other than that 1 incident, I was always treated nicely when I went to visit them. As the old saying goes, the customer with a bad experience will repeat his story 100x while the customer who receives good service rarely says anything. Good service is supposed to be the norm, not the exception.