281–290 of 325 posts
Oh, this time I tried Truecar first, but the fleet manager price was lower.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some fences need to remain. Take barbers/hairdressers, for instance. It turns out that a barbershop can be a great place for spreading head lice. You want your barber/hairdresser to be trained to prevent that. That's part of what their licensing is about. So, are there any aspects of being a car dealer that are worthwhile fences? Offhand, I can't think of any, but that doesn't mean there are none.
Licensing only provides money to a regulatory system. Health inspectors may prevent head lice but word of mouth is still the main way a business gets shut down for shoddy work.
The difference, at least in theory, is that the health inspector prevents the outbreak. Word of mouth is generally more reactionary and after-the-fact.
I used to work with a company that worked with dealerships, and I learned some pretty surprising (to me) details. For example: In most cases, the dealership buys the cars on the lot from the manufacturer via vastly short term loans. When the above article mentions the cost of sitting inventory, I assume that is what is being discussed. This isn't like inventory in a store, where the main concern is that it is losing…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Customers hate having "mileage" on a new car I don't know why the swaps are driven. Why doesn't the dealer get a 1-ton truck and trailer, and haul the car to keep the odometer low? Oh, and the story about "Our swaps are gently driven by retirees" is bogus. I've been passed by those guys going 90 mph.
As I understand it, local sales taxes are paid to the state where the sale is made. I assume every state has lots of car dealerships, but only a few states have car manufacturers. This would mean that if everyone started buying their cars online direct from the manufacturers then the taxes would go from being distributed around the country to being concentrated to a few states. Surely those states without manufacturers would lose a lot of sales tax if this happened, so would have a strong incentive to oppose such a change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but you are ignoring important information. The car itself has not depreciated. We are misattributing the depreciation. It's a different bundle of products. There is nothing intrinsically price-reducing about being driven one mile. The lower price is due to various market failures or trust breakdowns, not b/c the car itself has changed.
That's a equivocation fallacy on the semantics of the word depreciate . There are many different types of value that are reflected in the market price of a good. Cars that are no longer new lose value, thus by definition they depreciate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thinking only of the environmental impact, I'd expect any new car regardless of energy source to be far worse than a used car. Given the increased prices in the used car market (arising in part due to better durability and quality), I think I might be able to make an interesting argument for incentives towards purchasing used cars as being better for the environment than incentives for purchasing brand-new electric c…
Incentives on new vehicle sales can change the fleet mix. I don't see how incentives on used sales can do that (there would be some more focus on resale value, but people already consider that). I think in the US we would get the most mileage out of reforming CAFE to make it less friendly to daily driver trucks.
I am English, not American, so I may be misunderstanding this - but I believe sales tax might prove an incentive for some states to oppose any changes to their existing laws on this. As I understand it, local sales taxes are paid to the state where the sale is made. I assume every state has lots of car dealerships, but only a few states have car manufacturers. This would mean that if everyone started buying their car…
I'll post the same thing I posted in the Bob Lutz on the Tesla thread with some amendments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10457754 According to Bob Lutz having car dealerships is a pro. LOL, I am yet to talk to anybody who actually enjoyed the car dealership experience weather it's buying or servicing the car. The whole car dealer enterprise is a rent seeking business. In many states you cannot have the manufa…
This what we do when we are car shopping. Normal cycle is to start looking when the existing car hits the 8% mark in unscheduled maintenance (or 150K miles) (your percentage may vary). Once we close in on the model we like we find a rental and drive it for a week. If it passes we find a dealer, get the model and what we want on it and then shop that info around between multiple dealers in the area.
We never use the existing car to trade in since most are 10 years old and have lots of mileage on them. When we pick up the new car we will offer it to the dealer as a trade and decide at that point if we want to sell it to them. Last cycle the dealer said he would give us another $200 off the deal if he didn't need to take the trade.