Mercedes-Benz dealer accused of deception

Vietnam Star Automobile, an authorized retailer of German automaker Mercedes-Benz in Vietnam, has been accused of selling an old model car at the price of a new model one.

Last January Nguyen Thi Kim Lan, director of Ho Chi Minh City-based Thien Thien Phu Co. Ltd, bought a Mercedes - Benz GLK 300 4Matic 2011 model from Vietnam Star at US$70,400.

2 months later, Lan registered the car and was stunned to learn from the registry that her car was in fact manufactured in 2009.

When she complained to the retailer, its sales manager, Nguyen Paul Toan Thang, assured her that the car was not made in 2009.

He said the car’s frame number only indicated the year the frames were made, not the time when the whole car was assembled.

He said that Lan’s vehicle was assembled by Mercedes – Benz Vietnam (MBV) last July.

But Lan was still not satisfied with these answers.

“No one would expect to buy a car that was manufactured 2 years ago for over $70,000,” she said.

“When I used the car as collateral for a bank loan, it was valued at less than 30 percent of its original price.”

Lan continued to petition until last August, when Thang told her that Vietnam Star could not give her a 2011 model car or the 30 percent price difference.

But Thang said instead she was offered a trip worth $10,000 to Frankfurt City in Germany to attend an automobile exhibition.

Lan, however, turned down this offer.

In the purchasing contract signed between Lan and the dealer, there was no information about the manufacturing year of the car.

In a meeting with Lan early last month, Martin Schulz, MBV’s director of sales and marketing, affirmed that all parts of the car Lan had bought were imported from Germany in October 2009 and the car itself was first assembled last June and completed a month later.

Ingbert Grombach, MBV’s technical director, said there was an inconsistency in the vehicle identification number (VIN) which indicated a vehicle’s model year in Lan’s case.

Grombach said all cars were made at MBV, but the VINs were granted by its parent company Daimler in Germany and this sometimes resulted in cases when the VINs were not consistent with the real model years.

Meanwhile, a representative of the Vietnam Register, the government agency in charge of vehicle safety, said the agency was completely capable of determining whether the car was produced in 2009 or 2011.

“The difference between cars of 2009 and 2011 model years is quite considerable,” he said.