Understanding Virginia’s Car Dealership Laws

In examining the complexities of Virginia’s car dealership laws, we find a case study that serves as a valuable guide to the development of why business educators must quickly become familiar with the laws of their locality, and the role of those laws in shaping the customer and dealership interactions. The ramifications of the problems that dealerships have with the law are too numerous to list, but range from a deception of the customer on the price of the vehicle, to the liability of the damage done to a customer’s vehicle after sale.

Educators that are seeking to establish a comprehensive curriculum regarding business must consider the legal ramifications of their instruction, and teach students how to obtain access to the laws of their local communities. Instructors must also be open to the fact that laws such as the comprehensive Virginia car dealership laws may exist in other states, but they may also be completely different than the laws in another jurisdiction, so the instructor is obligated to make sure that his or her lesson plans are tailored to the laws that regulate and affect the business being studied.

When making decisions about which dealership to use in teaching students about the best ways to approach business, an instructor needs to be open and honest about the fact that there are dealership setups in Virginia that could easily allow a company to run afoul of the law, especially because of the fact that the dealership system utilizes evasive language and misleading practices to hide the true costs of a vehicle. These practices can have a profound effect on how people view the automobile business, because of the fact that sometimes you have to lie to yourself about the price that your paying, or the fees that you’re incurring, and this brings up the issue of whether or not customers can trust what a “verbal contract” indicates when you’re in a car dealership. That speaks to understanding the law and its peculiarities in the area, and understanding how the dealership system operates in the specific community a business is located in.

If an instructor thinks that he or she can ignore the statutes or regulations of a state because they are “common sense,” like in the case of having insurance as a car dealer, they might be surprised at the amount of litigation that would arise from thinking that way, simply because they didn’t know that a dealer was required to ha