Avoid McCarthy Hyundai of Lawrence

I’m here sharing my experience after purchasing a car from McCarthy Hyundai in Lawrence Kansas.

I have never bought a new car in my life and this was my first experience doing so. Every car I’ve gotten was a used car and was generally smooth. I saw a car and a price I liked. I would go look at the car to confirm and after a quick look over it, I would buy it. They would usually offer a few things but I was never pressured to get anything I didn’t want.

I decided I liked the Ioniq 5 and my local Hyundai dealers didn’t have any in the spec I wanted. Being in the South they don’t stock many AWD cars and didn’t seem to want to try and get one for me. They were more interested in convincing me I didn’t want what I wanted but that’s another story.

There were red flags before I even got there. I reached out and a salesman Fabian started talking to me. I told him I wanted an Ioniq 5 SE with AWD and then he showed me what he had. This was on Monday 2026/05/04. Tuesday we now have a car, an out the door price and he just needs to call me with his manager on the phone to finalize. He sends me an add-on services sheet before the call. I reply that I’m not interested in that but I’m available but he then says the call will be at 4pm that day. That time passes and I don’t hear anything. I have booked a flight now but I don’t have confirmation that we are good as they never called me. Wednesday now I call them myself and ask if we are confirmed since if we aren’t I need to cancel my flight. Omar the manager answers and says everything is good and keep the flight to come work out a deal. Flight is scheduled for Friday. It’s Thursday now and while I’m looking over the sheets sent to me I notice that the car we have been looking at is RWD. This was my only dealbreaker. If I wanted a RWD car I would have just got one from a local dealer. So they scramble and say they do have AWD car but it’s not in the color I wanted. Fine, I’m still interested but it comes with a $3500 price increase. I ask for the out the door price, window sticker, and pictures of the actual car because their website shows stock photos of a blue car instead of this new gray one. I get the out the door price but nothing else by the end of the day. I now have to take it on faith they have it and leave first thing in the morning the next day.

For context my flight was at 5am from my town and I was awake since 2am since I couldn’t sleep being worried about waking up on time. I arrive in Kansas and get picked up by Landon, one of the salesman. Landon is not the salesman I’ve been working with but no issues with him. We just make small talk and when we get to the dealership he shows me the car we talked about. I took it for a quick drive and confirmed I want to proceed. We have some little back and forth on final pricing and everything is good.

It’s not a secret that “Finance Managers” are just Senior Salesman that are there to juice every sale at the last minute to get everything out of people before the final papers are signed. See a good breakdown here

This is where things take a turn. I now have to complete the sale with the finance manager Omar. One of the services offered is ceramic coating the car. This is something I was interested in doing since it’s a new car and I wanted to protect the paint. Now as far as I know this is long process and takes about 5 hours to apply and then the coating needs about a day to dry. This is going by a video I’ve seen where it was done. I suspected I was going to have to get my car the next day or get a voucher to get it done locally. The price was $900 and this is in line with prices I’ve heard so I thought I would go ahead and get it. The first step is to wash the car thoroughly and run a clay bar all over it to make sure no dirt particles get sealed into the coating. Hence why it takes awhile to complete. My suspicions were alarmed when they completed the coating in about 15 minutes and even did the inside of the car. According to Omar, “We have it down to a science!”, so my car is already done. The science they have it down to doesn’t include physics it seems. But it did include a nice fat fee to add to my bill for all I can imagine is someone spraying a can of scotch guard in the general direction of my car.

We start just talking about general things and he asked me if I was concerned about anything on the car. I did have one concern which is the ICCU module on the Ioniq cars. Hyundai has not fully fixed the problem yet as far as I know and they are replacing them but it’s taking a month or longer for some people and they are not offering loaners. Little did I know he was going to use this information against me Omar had never heard of this despite it being a widespread issue and Hyundai even having to extend warranties due to this. He convinced me at first for the extra coverage during the factory 10 year warranty period that he says would cover everything for that full time where as Hyundai’s only covers powertrain for that period. Also that it also covers a loaner if it has to go in for work as he said that is not covered by Hyundai. So he was happy and we started down the process of buying the car. We got the total amount for the car and these add-ons brought the car up to a price I did not want to go near. I realised while these addons aren’t that much compared to the car. It was almost 10% added which is quite significant. I asked if we start over and remove the added warranty and that’s when his fake smile dropped and every dirty sales tactic was about to be unleashed on me.

He tried to create urgency by saying the price he gave me was a limited time special that he gave me. It was half off, I should feel so lucky! He tried to make it even more discounted just because he cares so much to make sure I get taken care of. Because as my best friend he only has my interest at heart! Despite only meeting each other about an hour before. He argued and fought with me on every little detail of why I didn’t want it. He told me he doesn’t want to see me with a broken car due to a $4000 computer part. I asked him to name one of these exact parts and he could not. Over and over we went. After saying no ten times I finally had enough and had to threaten to cancel everything and leave. I did actually book a round trip flight so this wasn’t an idle threat. I was booking a uber ride on my phone to leave when he finally relented and just let me buy the damn car. Keep in mind I was buying the car at the official MSRP. The dealer’s cut is already baked in and the only offer I was getting was 0% financing and a $3500 incentive that comes from Hyundai and not the dealer. At no point did we ever even talk about haggling on the car. He kept trying to add on other services against my consent. My car, my choice or so I thought. I felt like I was fighting for my life just to buy the car at the advertised price.

After what felt like hours in the boiler room I was finally able to buy the car and get out of there. I had to throw up in the bathroom as my nerves were wrecked after having someone try railroad me for thousands of dollars.I did get stuck with the $900 ceramic coating as I too distracted to circle back to fight that. This was a very long day for me. Starting at 2am to get on my flight. Missing one flight due to delays. I finally got to the dealer around 3pm. By this point it was 6pm and I had a 15 hour drive to get back home. This is by far the worst dealership experience I’ve ever had in my life. I’ve felt less stress in a timeshare presentation that you are locked into. Do not give your business to this company that is using these tactics to squeeze every last bit of money out of you.