Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

Post by astura » Mon, Jun 24, 2024, 4:26 PM UTC

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #53

vunderba wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a hell of a purchase to make effectively "sight unseen" without the ability to test drive the vehicle first which you would do at a dealership. The last vehicle I purchased was certified preowned and I went through several models before landing on one - much of my decision was based on how the vehicle handled to me.

We buy so many things "sight unseen" because of the quality and reliability. As an average car consumer, I have done many test drives and gotten nothing out of it except the car salesman looking like he did something. I will buy a reliable car sight unseen like I bought my big screen t.v.

Post by kristjansson » Mon, Jun 24, 2024, 4:26 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #54

DowagerDave wrote: post #37

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I'm not sure why you hate car dealerships so much, doesn't your opinion apply to any distributor between the manufacturer and the end consumer? This is a the same narrative that people said about bicycle retailers as well, but there are significant problems with the DTC model, notably service and support. And if you look where dealerships are located nobody wants to build housing in a big strip beside the freeway.

Dealerships are a special case. From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dealership > They have considerable political influence and have lobbied for regulations that guarantee their survival and profitability. By 2010, all US states had laws that prohibited manufacturers from side-stepping independent car dealerships and selling cars directly to consumers. By 2009, most states imposed restrictions on the cr…

Post by lainga » Mon, Jun 24, 2024, 4:26 PM UTC

tmpz22 wrote: post #122

hubraumhugo wrote: post #102

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My entrepreneurial mind immediately thinks: Let's create a better solution to revolutionize this industry and make the old, expensive incumbents obsolete. We can drive to the affected car dealers and migrate them one by one. Of course, I'm not going to do it and it's probably extremely hard :)

Enterprise vendors have gotten better at locking in customers on multi-year contracts which takes away some of the biggest upside to chipping away at the market. Often a challenger will come in and snag a few smaller deals but the Monopoly has a plethora of options to swat it away - rev up their larger more experienced product team to compete, lobby for regulation, poach from the challenger, acquire the challenger, t…

Post by n4r9 » Mon, Jun 24, 2024, 4:28 PM UTC

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #67

n4r9 wrote: post #13

This is what happens when a single player (CDK Global) has massive market share (90% when measured by number of vehicles sold [0] --- EDIT: this is actually the combined market share of CDK + Reynolds, who have a non-compete agreement ---). The entire industry becomes fragile to product issues and/or malicious attacks. Anti-trust is important. [0] https://casetext.com/case/loop-llc-v-cdk-global-llc-in-re-de...

That 90% is for both of the two biggest DMSes, CDK and Reynolds & Reynolds. Both DMSes have been around since the '70s or so, so they're probably considered a safe option by a lot of dealers.

Post by neilv » Mon, Jun 24, 2024, 4:29 PM UTC

ryanmccullagh wrote: post #109

neilv wrote: post #19

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The usual case for software development the last decade is developers who don't fully understand what they're doing, and are mostly focused on resume-driven-development (RDD) and looking good in Agile sprint standups. Noteworthy exceptions: FAANG promotion bid orientation, and VC growth startup alignment towards shipping something to look like growth towards exit. In a small minority of cases, you have developers who…

Not getting time to do security because we need to ship v1 is a decision called by Product