Last week I bought a new car. The dealer I purchased from offered a $200 “free gas” card as part of their counter to another dealer’s offer. It was obvious at the time the cards cost them less than face value hence their preference to use them in lieu of a cash discount, but I foolishly treated them as equivalent to their face cash value for the purposes of negotiation. Once I got home and researched the cards a bit, it became clear they are one of the many bits of sales trickery in the car salesman’s arsenal.

You can visit the FreeGasCentral website and see for yourself, but here are some notes:

The way the card works is thus: you activate the card and choose the brand of gasoline you’ll be buying (Exxon, Chevron, Wal-Mart, etc). You then save your receipts every time you buy gas from the specified brand (and ONLY that brand). At the end of every month, if you’ve bought $100 or more worth of gas, you mail in the original receipts, and 30-60 days later you get a $25 gift card good for gas or merchandise from the brand of supplier you enrolled with. If you haven’t bought $100 or more worth of gas, you forfeit the $25 gift card for that month. This keeps up for (x/25) months, where x is the face value of the gas card.

This sucks in the following ways:

• If you don’t spend at least $100/month in gas, you get nothing from this card. I ride my bike to work most days, and even if I drive it’s 8 miles round trip, so it’s a strange month when I fill up more than once, let alone to the tune of $100. Nowhere on the card is this disclosed.

• Even if you do normally spend $100/mo in gas, any month you fall under that amount you leave money on the table. You can’t just accrue it to the next month, or get an extra month to meet your quota

• You’re locked in to the brand of gas you chose. If signed up for Exxon, but you find you’re low on gas and there’s only a Chevron around, well that doesn’t count towards your quota

• It’s not clear when the gift cards expire, but knowing these charlatans it’s probably very soon, so you have to either spend them on fuel (which does NOT count towards your $100 quota for the month), buy merchandise (and, realistically, how often do you find yourself buying “merchandise” from a gas station?), or sell the cards at a significant discount off face value.

• If you forget to grab a receipt, or you don’t mail them in time, you’re fucked. It’s like those mail-in rebate scams at Best Buy, only more insidious.

So, next time you’re offered a free gas card like the above, don’t treat it as anywhere near equivalent to its face value in cash until you closely review the terms and are certain you can get the full value from the card. Or, better yet, go somewhere else where they won’t try to cheat you with stupid gimmicks.