A car salesman is calling out his fellow salespeople for not giving car buyers both sets of keys with their purchase.
As proof, he shows the purported back room of a Toyota dealership. There are dozens of keys on a desk in the room. He claims these are all keys that go to cars that were already sold and says this is a direct result of the dealership dropping the ball on customer service.
TikTok account Cars 4 Sale (@toyota4sale) is purportedly run by a Toyota salesman. In a video posted June 16, he shows viewers a desk covered in key fobs. All the keys appear to be for Toyotas.
“What happens when the salesperson won’t do their job and check for a spare key for the customer?” he says.
“This is what happens.”
Next, he explains the significance of what the audience is seeing.
“We end up with thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars worth of keys,” the salesman says. “There’s even a key for a 2024 Toyota RAV4 Limited.”
He attributes these “missing keys” to a very specific cause: Lazy or negligent salespeople.
“There’s no salesperson to give the keys to the customer. It’s amazing,” he says. “Just because they forgot to check or they don’t want to check.”
His post has nearly 215,000 views as of Monday morning.
A missing second key is potentially problematic for a couple of reasons.
The first is financial. A new car key can cost up to $1,000, depending on the make and model of your vehicle.
Car owners have also expressed concern that the second key could get stolen or misplaced and later used to steal the vehicle. This would require the would-be thief to not only have access to the second key, however, but also to be able to track down the vehicle.
Not having a spare could also strand you if your first key’s battery dies or if it’s lost or misplaced. That’s why car owners generally prefer to have at least one spare.
The difficult truth when buying a used car is that you may not always get two keys. That’s because the car might’ve come into the dealership without a spare.
If you’re concerned someone may use a missing key to access your vehicle, you can ask the dealership to deactivate the lost key fob remotely.
In the event the dealership can’t or won’t deactivate the key, you can also contact a locksmith to reprogram the codes that allow the fob to start the vehicle.
One person who commented on Cars 4 Sale’s post accuses dealerships of having a nefarious reason for retaining one set of keys: So they can charge the customer for a new one.
“And it’s totally intentional so they can charge $600 for a new key,” they wrote.
If true, this would be a sneaky way to make a buck.
Edmunds reports that costs for replacing a basic key fob range from $50 to $100. For more expensive keys, such as a smart key, AutoZone says the costs can be as high as $1,000.
Still, it doesn’t seem overly likely that a dealership would run a racket of keeping one just to charge a customer for a replacement key.
It’s arguably more likely that dealers end up keeping a set because staff either didn’t know there was a second key, couldn’t find it, or didn’t bother to check, as Cars 4 Sale suggests.
Several people who commented on the post agree that the problem is with the dealership’s system.
“All spare key should be with all the paperwork/books who’s gonna look for keys like that no one,” one person said.
A second person agreed that the blame is misplaced. “Sounds like a management problem,” they wrote.
A third said they don’t leave a dealership without a spare key. “I won’t buy a used car without two keys,” they wrote.
Some people offered solutions to the stockpile of keys at the Toyota dealership.
One suggested, “Mail them to the customers. Take the cost out of commission.”
Motor1 reached out to Cars 4 Sale via TikTok for comment. We’ll be sure to update this post if he responds.
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