351–360 of 363 posts
I know some (former) CDK alumni and I'm not surprised. Notorious for paying below market in engineering and IT. A place to cut your teeth but not to stay.
Didn't they also outsource a large part to an India-focused outsourcer as well?
I haven't bought a new car in 8 years. Do they still do that thing with the pen and paper where they write down a bunch of numbers while crossing other numbers out randomly for like 10 minutes?
I still choose to just do it all by email anyway and then show up only to grab the keys. Works fine. Next time I'm going to go a step further and have them bring the car out to my driveway. They absolutely will, even if it just means having a salesman drive it out.
Someone needs to get fired over this. Probably an incompetent, non technical Product VP
Seems weird that to me that it make a front page on HN (from an European pov ; it's quite common)
Related note: car stealerships are a relic of the past. There is no reason why a middleman should exist when buying a car. Consumers should have the option to purchase directly from the manufacturer. I am personally not a fan of Tesla as a vehicle, but I admire the business model of buying directly from Tesla. Stealerships are a drain on the consumer. All that land they own can be used for productive economic activit…
Hard disagree. Shitty car dealers should be a relic of the past, sure, but the business model is sound. It's basically like every other product you buy. How often are you buying from the manufacturer? Almost everything you buy from a store. That's what a dealership is.
Inventory is nice to have for all the same reasons you are happy the home store has inventory. And a built-in service department with a good parts and knowledge source is pretty important for a big expensive device which requires maintenance and that you're going to keep long enough for it to break a couple times.
The laws protecting them, I do think should be repealed. But I don't see the business model going anywhere. And I am on my second Tesla, so I see the alternative. The buying experience is easier, sure, but otherwise it's all the same shit under a different name. And some dealers can provide the same experience, frankly. In the future all of them will, or they will go out of business.
Related note: car stealerships are a relic of the past. There is no reason why a middleman should exist when buying a car. Consumers should have the option to purchase directly from the manufacturer. I am personally not a fan of Tesla as a vehicle, but I admire the business model of buying directly from Tesla. Stealerships are a drain on the consumer. All that land they own can be used for productive economic activit…
I'm not in love with dealerships, but one thing that a dealership does is provide final QA on inbound cars. They don't catch everything, but they do catch some of the things that slipped through QA at time of manufacture. It's somewhat telling that Tesla has a bad reputation for delivered quality, and they don't have a dealership network that does final QA. Of course, dealerships also like to install unnecessary opti…
Indeed, a good dealer will spend several hours checking out the new arrivals and then detailing them to remove the transport dirt. AFAICT Tesla doesn't do this as well themselves, both my Model 3s had some fairly obvious defects that took me under a minute to spot.
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I'm not sure that's a good comparison. There are several middlemen before you buy a Coke or Pepsi. Usually, your soft drink is manufactured from the brand's syrup by a bottling partner, which is then distributed to a retailer, who you buy it from. e.g: https://www.coca-colacompany.com/content/dam/company/us/en/a...
I used to work for Pepsi-Co so I am well aware of how their distribution works. But in this case, at the point of retail it makes no difference. The store can sell as many different brands as they want. The problem is not the middlemen, it's the exclusivity arrangements that disincentivize brand competition.
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It is kind of a crazy model. You don't go to the Pepsi store for Pepsi and the Coke store for Coke. The exclusivity dealerships get enshrined in law is kinda nuts. Still, I think there is something to be said for independent dealerships overall for service quality. Trying to get a Tesla serviced is still something of a nightmare. In comparison the service departments of dealerships have are much more robust.
Everyone I know IRL never gets their car serviced at the actual dealership, always going to a third party repair shop. Tesla has service issues, I'm not sure that they're related to their lack of dealerships though.
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The thing is the car does probably exist somewhere - but it may be in their system, but allocated to someone (on paper only, because if they allocate it in the system it disappears from the website, but they want you to come in), or in transit (they appear on the website the moment the factory assigns a VIN build to the dealer, etc. And sometimes I swear it's just a glitch and they don't really care.
In my case it wasn't that: The dealer straight up imagined a sale they wanted to have, and were quite rude to me. Me: "I want to buy one of the cars you advertised in the newspaper." (It was 2003) Them: "We don't have those cars." Me: "But you're advertising this sale." Them: Poker face. It wasn't like they said, "Oh, yeah, that was a popular sale and they sold out." It was very clear they advertised cars they didn't…
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...
IIRC our market share is closer to 70%. It also includes businesses that people don't usually think of but are broadly similar to car dealerships in business model and therefore can be served with nearly identical software. Heavy equipment, etc. R&R doesn't have as wide a product offering as we do, and the upstart DMS providers trying to disrupt the market are even narrower than that. For all its problems, CDK is dom…
I was talking with one of your clients today (we're not competitors) and you just don't realise how far screwed some of these companies are right now.
It actually made an instant upsell today of 'here's our additional cloud sync' feature. No questions, no umming and ahhing, it's just 'yep done, add it, turn it on'. Heck we probably undersold it by 10x.
I hope you guys start getting some sense of normality soon and get systems back online.