171–180 of 363 posts
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> direct manufacturer auto sales are prohibited in many states by franchise laws requiring that new cars be sold only by independent dealers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_US_dealership_disputes not a monopoly per se, but "forced demand"
Doesn't just about everyone hate dealing with a dealership? Shouldn't it be very easy to vote to fix that in a democracy?
For about ten years, I've theorized that we will see the rise of 'boutique' doctor, dentist, and law offices that keep only paper records for the sake of the privacy of their clients. There are a bunch of problems that connection and automation bring with them, the rise of digital monocultures seems to be one of them.
Like any non-technical market, they just bought what was pitched, and there's often more gripes than complains.
One example:
When a patient transfers to another dental office, their records need to follow. Before you "had to" fax or snail-mail them. The software/cloud solutions promised streamlined, painless transfers, but those benefits never really materialized due to the amount of HIPA-compliancy issues (the details around this pain point are fuzzy).
The office-manager explaining all of this was (half-jokingly) fantasizing about going back to snail mail.
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...
why didn't Silicon Valley try to disrupt this market?
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Let's assume you're only selling what's on the lot, and you're not running some complex network operation where you care about other dealerships' stock. Googling tells me the average car salesman sells 8-10 cars per month. Maybe more for a 'high volume' dealership but certainly less than 1 car per day. I would think the paperwork to sell a single car would take substantially less than 8 hours for an experienced worke…
The paperwork to do one transaction might not be too bad, but keeping all the inventory on pencil and paper seems like a pain.
But an individual dealership has what, 50 cars in stock? That seems easily manageable to me. I'm old enough that I've seen far larger operations running on paper.
Of course, the days of paper-based paperwork did require businesses to employ diligent and numerate clerks, and to have filing cabinets, manual calculators, photocopiers, whiteout, and suchlike. I suppose they could have run into some challenges around that sort of thing.
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...
Maybe part of the problem is the reliance on the cloud. Will the pendulum ever swing back to on prem?
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...
why didn't Silicon Valley try to disrupt this market?
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Even when the system is working they have to go search the lot, because half the cars listed in the system are phantoms.
> half the cars listed in the system are phantoms How? Like, they order a certain number of cars from the dealership--do they just trickle in randomly? Do they forget to log sales? I get misplacing where the car is, but whether it is? Granted, I have friends who work at rental-car companies, and the level of shitshow they aspire to is truly inspiring.
I told him, "okay, well if you do get any in, call me up so I can come over and buy one." Easiest sale ever. Well, that didn't happen, and my assumption is that they just don't know what they have from day to day.
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Maybe part of the problem is the reliance on the cloud. Will the pendulum ever swing back to on prem?
Workloads are starting to converge back to on-prem and there hasn't been so much pressure on only cloud. Hybrid approaches seem to be prevailing (for much larger co's)
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My hot take is auto dealers are a notoriously painful enterprise sales cycle due to network effects aka "good 'ol boys" club (anecdotally from folks in tech who have to deal in this industry).
Maybe 30 years ago. That's not the case with big dealer groups or young small independents.
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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…
wait.. why is "rev up their larger more experienced product team to compete" bad?