Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kill the laws that keep car dealers in business

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 325 posts

Re: Kill the laws that keep car dealers in business

#111

Post by beeboop »

bgribble wrote: post #7

Yep, buying a car sucks. But this is one of the largest supply-chain operations in the world. The dealer franchise system and its legal framework have evolved over 100 years and are balanced pretty delicately. It can't just be refactored by waving a regulatory wand at it and hoping for the best. Cars will still have to be warehoused, delivered, serviced, and resold. Somebody has to buy your old junky trade-in. Somebo…

This is a terrible argument in support of franchise dealerships. If people care so much about being treated poorly by the manufacturer then they can go to a private dealership and pay thousands in markup to have someone smile at them through gritted teeth.

The idea that tension between manufacturers and the shitholes that are dealerships will somehow translate into tension between the manufacturer and buyers is ridiculous. Why would the $15/hour salesman be affected by this at all? He wouldn't be.

Re: Kill the laws that keep car dealers in business

#112

Post by jonlucc »

notjoedimaggio wrote: post #63
nomercy400 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't you have a free market economy? Where a customer is able to choose between a dealer or a direct sale company? The customer is the one that should be able to choose between a cheaper price with a lower service, or a higher price with more service. The problem here is that companies want to provide the cheap alternative but aren't allowed to do so. If a dealer cannot compete with a direct sale company on pric…

I agree in theory, but the reality is that these companies made large investments under one set of legislation. If a society flips and completely changes the economic/legislative landscape under which companies operate, it creates a very unstable business environment and discourages capex especially. This would not be good for the long term economic health.

That's like saying that Comcast and Verizon accepted public money to roll out infrastructure and invested their money in it. Therefore, we probably shouldn't address their artificial monopoly, because they invested money in their monopoly.

Re: Kill the laws that keep car dealers in business

#113

Post by gnoway »

venning wrote: post #83
jasode wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A dealership inventory is controlled in such a way that area dealerships are forced to compete heavily with each other. In order to sell a car, you have to have a car on your lot. In order to have a car on your lot, you have to order it from Honda. Maybe Toyota does it differently from Honda but this is the way the Toyota dealership manager explained it to me: all the dealerships are grouped into a "region" such as…

Yes and no. Yes, we could see the inventory of every Honda dealer in the region. And yes, we could exchange cars. However, the "requirement" that cars be swapped was something that managers told customers to ease their minds while they steered them towards a car that was on our lot. The only requirement was that both dealers had to agree on which cars were being swapped. Why tell them that? Because managers are loath…

You can't. It's aggravating.

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Re: Kill the laws that keep car dealers in business

#114

Post by blumkvist »

devit wrote: post #2

Maybe the dealerships and in general physical shops should evolve into paid-for showrooms? That is, you pay, say, $50, and you get to try a bunch of cars or in general products that they have on loan from various manufacturers and get some guidance from the staff if needed. Then once you figure out what you want, you buy it online and get it shipped to you. Then there is no need to "protect" those shops, since the cu…

I'm very curious as to how much time did you spend thinking about this solution before proposing it to fix the extremely complex problem of distributing durables.

Re: Kill the laws that keep car dealers in business

#115

Post by Rumford »

There are some interesting comments in here about how tough the struggle is for car dealerships, but I don't think that necessarily justifies their existence or mitigates the point of this article.

If what the dealerships do is valuable enough to the customer, they would exist even without the ban on direct sales. But I think we can all intuit that if the ban were lifted, buying a car would be a very different (and better) experience.

Re: Kill the laws that keep car dealers in business

#116

Post by Asbostos »

rch wrote: post #93
joosters wrote: post #61

"Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up" You can't write a balanced article on car dealerships without researching why these laws were enacted in the first place. So many people here just assume "oh, it's because of greed" - but perhaps you should spend a short time first of all investigating why these laws were created and the problems they were trying to solve. Likewise, you can't…

I seem to recall that the laws were put in place, at least in part, to protect the dealers who were financing the manufactures, only to have the manufactures come in and sell directly once vehicles were ready.

I'd have thought a contract between the dealer and manufacturer would have solved that. Why don't other industries need laws to protect retailers from manufacturers?

Re: Kill the laws that keep car dealers in business

#117

Post by blumkvist »

dankohn1 wrote: post #31
Shivetya wrote: post #26

How do you plan to buy out all the existing investment these dealerships have? You certainly cannot legislate away their property without compensation. What about the jobs? That is no small number. With those go all the local taxes, benefits, and such as well. Dealer direct, sounds good. Until you find out that car you really want has a demonstration center that is too far away, in a place you don't want to go. Until…

The author isn't arguing to ban traditional dealerships; he's trying to remove state laws that mandate the bundling of sales, service, delivery, etc. together. If the traditional model makes sense in some places, it will continue. But given that no other consumer good is sold that way, it is likely that both producers and consumers will prefer an unbundled experience.

The state has other constituents besides the individual citizens. These laws have very sound reasoning and prevent very real and very big problems. Blindly running around, finding things to "disrupt" is not admirable. In fact, it's the opposite.

Re: Kill the laws that keep car dealers in business

#118

Post by jzwinck »

lsaferite wrote: post #101
nothrabannosir wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up" This is the most frustrating thing about uncommented sleep() calls sprinkled through a codebase.

Commit history maybe?

"Fixed bug."

Re: Kill the laws that keep car dealers in business

#119

Post by Coincoin »

lsaferite wrote: post #101
nothrabannosir wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up" This is the most frustrating thing about uncommented sleep() calls sprinkled through a codebase.

Commit history maybe?

Yeah, until you realize dozens of them have been peppered across the code base in a desperate attempt to "fix concurrency issue".

Re: Kill the laws that keep car dealers in business

#120

Post by ceejayoz »

lsaferite wrote: post #101
nothrabannosir wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up" This is the most frustrating thing about uncommented sleep() calls sprinkled through a codebase.

Commit history maybe?

"fix" "trying again" "revert" "will it work?"
Post reply on HN