David Pitlyuk

There is a story going around about a guy under the alias of dooma350 at M3Post.com. He had given a deposit at his local BMW dealership (Husker BMW) for the sought after new 2008 M3, but decided to look and see what offerings he could find on eBay. He found one advertised as “LOWEST PRICE ON EBAY” that had a starting price of $60,000 with no reserve. The buy it now price was $66,926. Considering dealerships are marking these up as high as $100,000, they were probably under the impression that the eBay listing would generate a little hype and they wouldn’t have to be worried about the price staying at $60,000…which is exactly what happened when dooma350 won the auction.

15 minutes after winning the auction, he received a call from the BMW dealership in Nebraska saying that they would not honor the price due to it was a “mistake”. This was definitely a cop out, as the auction’s buy it now price was changed twice throughout the auction. This tells us that the auction was being watched by the dealership, and a “mistake” is pretty unlikely.

The entire story can be read and followed over at the original post on M3Post.com. Many of the forum members are very helpful, offering advices, contacting media outlets, and more. One member by the alias of “Xcellere” even called the dealership and threatened legal action. Another member who is a licensed attorney in Texas that offered some legal advice…and was even willing to take action at no cost had he been licensed in Nebraska.

All sorts of advice was given in terms of whom to contact, from BMW North America to eBay to the BBB to local media outlets. I think between this story starting to spread (It was just covered on Autoblog), dooma350 will get his price…and maybe even more. This is horrible PR on the dealerships part, as well as BMW. The dealership has already offered the car up for $3,000 lower than the MSRP price, but at this point, it’s not enough. The dealership may have lost a few thousand dollars by doing the right thing, but there is a great potential of losing a lot more than that by not.

Do you think that the dealership should have done the right thing? If they were really this hard pressed about not giving the $60,000 price, they should have either set a reserve on the auction, set the starting price higher, or worse…cancel the auction before it ended. They could have even tried to offer something up when they first said the auction was a “mistake”, instead of just saying it and ending it like that.

Let’s hope that dooma350 gets his M3 at the price he deserves it for. For now you can Digg the original Autoblog article here so that the story can get spread around even more.