Car dealers beware! CDM Data also known as Karpower owned by Kelley Blue Book Inc. is an electronic information company set up by Kelley Blue Book. Here is what they offer you to get you hooked. They will lease you a $1000 tablet PC with a camera running their own proprietary software. This setup you use to take pictures of your cars and then upload it to their site which in turn gets loaded to different websites like Autotrader.com. They offer you many sites but it's always the free ones. This lease cost me a little over $16,000 over 3 years. I was told by their reps that once the lease is over, I can buy the unit for $1.00 and use it with their system forever. Well the $16,000 price tag was a lot but I did it cause it was a good long-term investment.
This past month, the 3 years was up and I was told they are disconnecting the unit from the network unless I sign up for another term. When I asked about the promise at the time I signed up, their comment was, "Yes, you can keep using it as a computer at home but you cannot use it for the purpose it was sold to you for". Since it won't connect to their network anymore, so no data will be sent out from it. Basically, now I have a $16,000 laptop that I can buy for $300 in the store.
Kelley Blue Book aka CDM Data aka Karpower is taking advantage of us hardworking dealers. The economy really put us through a lot of hardship and it doesn't help when such a big company takes advantage of hardworking business owners. These guys have reps who promise you the moon, fraudulently getting you to sign a contract, then tell you later it's a whole different program than what you signed up for. I am looking for dealers who also went through this to start a class action suit against these guys.
