In response to lingering car sales, Chrysler is now offering a 60 money back guarantee when you buy one of their 2101 Mini-vans. This is like taking a test drive for your lifestyle and a great selling tool as once you get used to the car, you are not going to be prone to give it back unless you have a life changing situation or the ride is just junk.

Sales of the Chrysler Town & Country and Dodge Grand Caravan minivans fell 28% in the U.S. last year as many previous customers worried about Chrysler’s financial troubles and the powers that be at Chrysler believe that getting you behind the wheel of a Caravan or Town and Country will aid in getting consumer confidence back.

Of course there are caveats in this whole deal… you must drive the van for 30 days, you can’t drive it over 4,000 miles, you have to trade in a competitors car and if you do return the van you will not get the trade in back. That last contingency may chase away some folks from this offer but if you have a real old beater, it won’t matter if you do not get it back.

This offer is one that I call “Smoke and Mirrors” as they are not interested in whether you bring the van back or not… it is all about changing the consumer’s perception of the automaker. It is not unlike the 100,000 mile warranties that Hyundai was offering for a time… you’ll almost never keep a car for 100,000 miles but the public was seeing the automaker stand behind the car for 100K so they automatically assume that the car is strong like bull.

If this program works as well as GM’s recent promotion (GM said customers returned 505 vehicles out of 439,000 sold on a similar deal which ran from September 2009 until last month) Chrysler executives will be thrilled and so will the stockholders.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 10:31 am and is filed under US Business News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.