121–130 of 612 posts
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It's a big purchase, so you'd want to at least test it out in person?
Rivian, for example, offers to let you return the vehicle after delivery to your driveway for up to the first of a week or a 1000 miles.
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In many small to medium size towns if you find the family who owns the local ($BRANDNAME) dealership they are often among the wealthiest people in the entire county. edit: I can see from the two other comments here alongside mine that this is a common observation.
What does that have to do with anything?
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Maybe instead of auto manufacturers getting all the profit it’s nice that a local middleman gets rich too?
But it sounds like the local middleman is getting rich at the expense of fellow-locals
I'm now convinced it is a bad idea. But I don't see it being good for local at all.
A lot has been said about the dealership model in the last few years, and the almost universal consensus is that it is an unnecessary and predatory industry and all auto makers should just sell cars directly like Tesla does. That being said, is there any counterpoint to this view? Are there any benefits that dealerships offer today over direct sales? What would we lose if we got rid of every dealership? If there is t…
Tesla has made fixed-price online sales work so far, but notice that they're scrambling to build the support network. They're re-creating most of the dealership model but bringing the ownership in-house. That's only good if their customer service is good, because now you don't really have any good alternatives.
> why has this obvious disruption never come up in the last ~100+ years of car sales in this country and all over the world?
This is important. We can try to point to laws, but the more likely answer is that the current model is the best we've invented yet. There have been attempts to change, and more often than not it's the consumers that reject it, not lawmakers.
I'm surprised they see spending less on advertising as part of their EV strategy. Copying Tesla in that regard might not work out the way they want it to. IMO Non-Tesla EVs are already facing an uphill awareness battle.
From what I've seen of the coverage, that doesn't quite seem true for the F150. It has decades of name recognition built up and lots of buzz going on for it already. The F150 may be the first real ICE>EV mega crossover thst happens.
yep: https://carbuzz.com/news/ford-mustang-will-go-all-electric-i...
A lot has been said about the dealership model in the last few years, and the almost universal consensus is that it is an unnecessary and predatory industry and all auto makers should just sell cars directly like Tesla does. That being said, is there any counterpoint to this view? Are there any benefits that dealerships offer today over direct sales? What would we lose if we got rid of every dealership? If there is t…
The big 3 auto makers are all located in Michigan, USA. If they sold a vehicle direct, the sales tax dollars goes to the State of Michigan. Which means all the other states are missing out on *significant* tax dollars.
To force each state to get tax dollars, local dealerships were established. That way tax dollars go to the state the vehicle is sold in, rather than the state the vehicle manufacturer is located in.
I'm curious if this has changed at all over the last 20 years with the rise of e-commerce. For example, when I order a product on Amazon, do I pay taxes on that product for where I live (where the product is "purchased"?), or where Amazon is headquartered?
A lot has been said about the dealership model in the last few years, and the almost universal consensus is that it is an unnecessary and predatory industry and all auto makers should just sell cars directly like Tesla does. That being said, is there any counterpoint to this view? Are there any benefits that dealerships offer today over direct sales? What would we lose if we got rid of every dealership? If there is t…
It's not that I enjoy haggling with car salesmen, walking out the door and getting hunted down in the parking lot like an animal... I don't... in fact I hate it. But at the end of the day I get a deal I'm satisfied and comfortable with - and it's always below MSRP - far below.
I think what we're seeing here is a combination of the younger generation's fear of conflict (a negotiation is an adversarial conflict), coupled with car manufacturers realizing a lot of people are totally OK paying $10,000+ over MSRP... almost "bidding" for a car.
I fully expect prices to increase, while overhead decreases (no sales staff, no stale inventory, no loss of inventory, rent payments, etc). But the younger generation will feel great because they got to click a button and a grossly overpriced car shows up the next day - just like "Amazon but for Cars!".
I can't see any positive coming out of this. You don't buy anything over a few thousand bucks without negotiating. Even the photo copier at your office was negotiated for days or weeks... how can someone buy a $50,000 vehicle at MSRP/Invoice price and claim they didn't throw away money?
It used to be only suckers walked into a dealership and paid sticker price... bigger suckers payed more than sticker price (gotta have that undercarriage coating), and everyone else paid closer to the true price having researched what similar vehicles sold for etc.
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Local profit? That is, in many towns, my understanding is that the local dealerships are relatively well off. Which implies that a bit more of the money is kept local to where the cars are being sold. I'm guessing this is less true today than in years past.
In many small to medium size towns if you find the family who owns the local ($BRANDNAME) dealership they are often among the wealthiest people in the entire county. edit: I can see from the two other comments here alongside mine that this is a common observation.
Oh, I think it's pretty clear that unless this strategy goes totally off the rails, that's definitely where they're heading. It'll converge (albeit at different rates) with the shift away from selling non-EV products altogether.
Apart from the obvious and immediate profit bumps, there's knock-on effects, such as not forcing your customers to deal with the second least trusted profession in the USA. [1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/01/11/americ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In many small to medium size towns if you find the family who owns the local ($BRANDNAME) dealership they are often among the wealthiest people in the entire county. edit: I can see from the two other comments here alongside mine that this is a common observation.
What does that have to do with anything?
Owning a car sales franchise is one of the best forms of rent-seeking, thanks to state and federal laws protecting car dealers.