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Ford CEO says EVs will be sold 100% online with nonnegotiable price

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Re: Ford CEO says EVs will be sold 100% online with nonnegotiable price

#331

Post by cycrutchfield »

grogenaut wrote: post #259
chemmail wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only time you can get a "good deal" on a car, is for a car no one wants anyways. Go ahead try it with a decent car.

Not just cars no one wants. Last car I bought, a Subaru Forrester, which is like 25% of cars in Seattle, I knocked $4000, off of msrp by haggling from 28k to 24k, cross shopping across dealers and walking in with a set price I was willing to pay after finding the lowest dealer. Also going in during 2 manufacturer rebates (one cash, one charity match), and at the end of the quarter. 2018s were starting to show up, bou…

I would rather sit through a timeshare pitch. What a waste of time for all involved

Re: Ford CEO says EVs will be sold 100% online with nonnegotiable price

#332

Post by [deleted] »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #321
olyjohn wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$3k in maintenance costs for 400,000km? I call bull shit. In Tesla tire sizes, you're looking at $1000 for a cheap ass set of tires. Certainly not gonna last 100,000 miles either.

You don't need to buy tires at the dealership, and in fact most people don't.

[deleted]

Re: Ford CEO says EVs will be sold 100% online with nonnegotiable price

#333

Post by thomasjudge »

jayceekay wrote: post #289
toomuchtodo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diplomacy is the art of saying “good dog” until you make it to the rock. Ford is learning what Tesla knew from the start: dealership interests aren’t aligned with EV manufacturers. There’s very little service revenue, and dealers are incentivized to add “market adjustments” to vehicles (which Ford dealers have been doing) creating a poor customer experience. Ford has existing dealerships and is going to have a heck o…

> "Diplomacy is the art of saying “good dog” until you make it to the rock." this was new to me and the 'to the rock' part didn't make sense to me, so i looked it up. http://marvin.cs.uidaho.edu/About/quotes.html this page says it's actually this: "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggy' until you can find a rock." find a rock as in kill them? :O

It doesn't have to be killing them, if a stray hostile dog is harassing you throwing a rock at it might make it go away

Re: Ford CEO says EVs will be sold 100% online with nonnegotiable price

#334

Post by spikels »

medler wrote: post #82

This article takes an off-the-cuff comment from the CEO of Ford and reads too much into it IMO. He wasn’t saying dealerships are going away; he was actually saying the opposite. The point he was making was that Ford is going to adopt some of Tesla’s practices while using the dealership network to compete with them. Here’s the quote with more context: “I believe for retail, we have to -- it's kind of like what happene…

Ford reorganized back in March so that their EV business (Model e) is separate from the legacy ICE business (Ford Blue). There was speculation at the time that this was in part free itself of the dealership sales model. The dealers would keep the dying ICE business while the fast growing EV business would start with clean slate. Farley was quoted describing the EV sales model as:

> "It's going to be much more efficient, a lot more online. It's going to be a really different model."[1]

Obviously this will be very controversial and subject to interference by state legislators who have often protected dealerships. Will be interesting to see this transition.

https://insideevs.com/news/571959/ford-dealerships-impacted-...

Re: Ford CEO says EVs will be sold 100% online with nonnegotiable price

#335

Post by spikels »

user3939382 wrote: post #326
medler wrote: post #82

This article takes an off-the-cuff comment from the CEO of Ford and reads too much into it IMO. He wasn’t saying dealerships are going away; he was actually saying the opposite. The point he was making was that Ford is going to adopt some of Tesla’s practices while using the dealership network to compete with them. Here’s the quote with more context: “I believe for retail, we have to -- it's kind of like what happene…

> This article takes an off-the-cuff comment from the CEO of Ford and reads too much into it Ford announced 3 months ago that they were forming a new corporation, Ford Blue, whose purpose is to skirt state dealership laws in order to lawfully sell these EVs direct to consumers. So this is definitely not just a comment. https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/ford/2022/03/02/ford-...

Was typing almost the same thing at the same time.

The OEMs want to us EVs to finally dump the dealerships.

Re: Ford CEO says EVs will be sold 100% online with nonnegotiable price

#336

Post by yourapostasy »

zorak8me wrote: post #324
m348e912 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Target could have gone away, but they didn't. They bolted on an e-commerce platform and then they used their physical store to add groceries and return -- make returns really much easier than Amazon. I know this is off-topic, but the easiest return I ever made was an amazon return. I went through the return process on amazon's website and was given a QR code which took a few mins. I drove to the nearest Kohls, walk…

Re: bestbuy “showrooming” issues, I think they actually figured out how to make it a value driver for them, whereas it killed others. It’s a great place to look at products, and they price match so you can walk out the door with the product instead of waiting.

> ... and they price match so you can walk out the door with the product instead of waiting.

I would love to see the behind-the-scenes numbers crunched on that model. I don't see how that model works long-term unless the percentage of customers in the showroom walking out the door with online price-matched goods is a relatively small group, or they're successful up- and cross-selling on gonzo margin goods and services before and after they walk out the door, or their COGS is way better, or some other activity to make up their bigger overheads versus an e-commerce marketplace.

Can anyone offer any insight how BestBuy is long-term sustainable with the online price matching policy?

Re: Ford CEO says EVs will be sold 100% online with nonnegotiable price

#337

Post by Aspos »

paxys wrote: post #39

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…

Back in 2001 GM hired my university professor to study what could be done with the dealer network. Even then it was clear dealers were of no use in the long run, but there were no practical ways of getting rid of them.

Forcing dealers to do repairs only effectively meant risking that best dealers would switch to other brands, other dealers would have to charge more for the service and these two factors could potentially kill any brand. No single manufacturer could pull it off, and even if they could find a way to work together to change legislation, it would be way too costly and way too risky.

Re: Ford CEO says EVs will be sold 100% online with nonnegotiable price

#338

Post by runnerup »

spikels wrote: post #334
medler wrote: post #82

This article takes an off-the-cuff comment from the CEO of Ford and reads too much into it IMO. He wasn’t saying dealerships are going away; he was actually saying the opposite. The point he was making was that Ford is going to adopt some of Tesla’s practices while using the dealership network to compete with them. Here’s the quote with more context: “I believe for retail, we have to -- it's kind of like what happene…

Ford reorganized back in March so that their EV business (Model e) is separate from the legacy ICE business (Ford Blue). There was speculation at the time that this was in part free itself of the dealership sales model. The dealers would keep the dying ICE business while the fast growing EV business would start with clean slate. Farley was quoted describing the EV sales model as: > "It's going to be much more efficie…

Huge thanks for this context.

Re: Ford CEO says EVs will be sold 100% online with nonnegotiable price

#339

Post by dixie_land »

antiterra wrote: post #150
bombcar wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of Target they’re getting sneaky - the online for pickup or delivery price is often higher than the same item instore. Once I saw that I got a bit sad.

In my experience it’s usually the opposite and I have to ask for a price match to the online price. It is their policy in the contiguous US to price match target.com to Target Store and Target Store to target.com. The policy doesn’t cover Target Store to other Target Store.

not target, but the “contiguous US” part reminded me of the time where at a Hawaii Walmart they refused to price match walmart.com. so I just ordered online right then and there and chose to pick up in the same store. I watched the same staff picking up the same item from the shelf and called me to the online pick up area…

Re: Ford CEO says EVs will be sold 100% online with nonnegotiable price

#340

Post by signatoremo »

smsm42 wrote: post #143
dghlsakjg wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a note, If you want to go sit in a Tesla or test drive one, you can still do that despite a complete lack of dealerships. In my experience, a Tesla is the only showroom experience where there was 0 pressure, and no-one trying to get my info or photocopy my driver license just to see the inside of a car. A lack of dealerships does not mean that there are no showrooms or test drives. There's nothing stopping Ford,…

The thing is Tesla is a luxury car for rich people - upper middle class and above. This means you only need a limited number of show rooms - where most rich people live - and rich people are also pretty mobile, so they can come to you. Scaling the same for car with more broad appeal may be hard to manage for the company, and there's no incentive for the third party to do it if they can't sell. Honda sells 4x more car…

I’m guessing EV sale in your state is minuscule compared to ICEs? Why do Tesla need more than one showroom if that one can handle all the sales in the state? Or maybe there are Tesla showrooms in adjacent states that are frequented by consumers from your state?

Also, not all Tesla sales happened after consumers visited their showrooms. Tesla itself planned to close most of their showrooms at some point [0], only to reverse it later. I’m sure they were confident their sales wouldn’t tank when making such decision. One dealer per state may be too few for Ford, how about five? or ten? Do you think Ford can’t afford five or ten showrooms?

[0] - https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/28/18245296/tesla-stores-clo...

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