Harley Davidson

I walked into the showroom at Paradise Harley-Davidson in Tigard, Oregon late last year, looked at their inventory, and bought a bike on the spot. The salesman was very young, and very phony; I had a complicated situation with my home address, mailing address, and domicile for the bike being three different addresses; I explained this to him no less than FOUR times, and confirmed that he was using the correct address just before I rode off on my new bike.

He still got it wrong, and they registered my motorcycle in the wrong State. After several phone calls, they fixed that issue, and I was supposed to get a refund of the State sales tax they charged me.

Not long after all this, my motorcycle was stolen. While talking to the insurance agent about it, he told me that Paradise had charged me $2,140 in inappropriate State sales tax, yet the 'refund' I got from Washington State was only about a tenth of that amount. . . and the insurance doesn't cover the tax, none of which should have been charged in the first place.

To make matters worse, the insurance agent told me that Paradise also charged me $3,399 in freight fees for a bike that was already on the showroom floor the day I first walked into the place and bought it. . . and that freight fee is also not covered by insurance. The insurance agent said that not only did they screw me by charging freight at all, but that the amount of $3,399 was the highest he'd ever seen, and was clearly a case of them cheating me.

I spoke to Shanitha at Paradise Harley-Davidson on the phone about all this; she went over the paperwork and openly admitted that they had 'mistakenly' overcharged me; she said she would work on making it right and call me back. I did not hear back from her, so after a week and a half I called again and spoke to someone else, who tried to tell me that this was all normal, and that the insurance is supposed to cover it!

I spoke again to the insurance agent; he was very clear and quite adamant that NO, this isn't normal, and NO, it isn't covered; they cheated me on both the tax and the freight. . . and after Shanitha openly admitting to me on the phone that they had 'mistakenly' done this and promising to fix it, another employee there intervened and gave me the brush-off.

Since then, I have been unable to get anyone at Paradise to even talk to me on the phone about it.

Today I spoke with Harley-Davidson Financial Services (the lender), and they looked at the paperwork and said that the bill of sale looks very atypical, and that I have clearly been massively overcharged.