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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

#381

Post by FireBeyond »

Victerius wrote: post #363
walrus01 wrote: post #66

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.

Okay, I'll bite. How do I open a dealership?

First step, have several million dollars available to you. Usually in the region of $10M (which was the estimate for the NBA player Damian Lillard's Toyota dealership, by the time you find a property, build it out, initial inventory stock, etc., etc.)

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

#382

Post by bombcar »

thaeli wrote: post #327
justapassenger wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oil change is maintenance not service. But ok, let’s include that. It’s done at the same time as rotating tires, so it only adds few extra bucks of revenue for dealers (yes, you can rotate yourself/at other places, same as you can do oil change). Transmission fluid for modern cars lasts about 100k miles. So you’ll do it maybe once, unlikely at your dealer as you won’t pay dealer tax for an old beater. Exactly the sam…

Timing belt is the only expensive thing on that list (because of labor) and very few American market vehicles use timing belts anymore. The market has gone almost entirely to timing chains these days.

We’re back to timing chains? I remember we used to have them back in the old days.

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

#383

Post by SoftTalker »

argonaut wrote: post #162
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…

1. Service centers. Others comments have talked about this. 2. Trade-ins. Most new car dealers also sell used cars (in fact many make more profit on used cars than with new cars). Because of this they can usually give you much better trade-in valuations than Tesla, which I believe just sends cars to auction. Obviously you could also just sell to CarMax/Carvana/etc. or sometimes sell a car to a dealership without buyi…

The worst price you will get for a used car is trading it in. The best thing to do is sell it privately, after researching what it is worth.

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

#384

Post by bombcar »

ericlewis wrote: post #364
yourapostasy wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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 service…

I've known people who work at Best Buy and they get their products substantially cheaper, just as the online retailers do. There is some level of bake in for storing it at the store... but not really much different from sitting in an amazon warehouse for instance, most best buys have large warehouses in the back you'd never be aware of. Many people aren't aware of the price matching nor take advantage of it, they als…

Best Butt is basically a group of warehouses across the country - order from them online and you may find your order shipped from random Beat Buy stores.

And for many of their products they all sell at MSRP anyway (apple laptops say) so they’re already matching Amazon et Al. And things like hdmi cables are some off brand and so they don’t price match anyway.

They have a pretty slick setup going, also jumped in on the appliances market just as Sears et Al disappeared.

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

#385

Post by bombcar »

signatoremo wrote: post #261
medler wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My interpretation is informed by the knowledge that what he’s saying is not legal in most of the United States. It’s understood that dealers cut into Ford’s profit margin, but Ford is not at liberty to change the laws in numerous states.

I’m not familiar with laws pertaining to the dealership. Why can’t Ford sell EVs the same way Tesla do? In the same states. They still sell ICEs via the dealers after all. Nothing changes

I’ve not seen the actual text of such a law, but I suspect the lawyers have and are working on how to get around them (or force a net neutrality swell of support to remove them, perhaps at a federal level utilizing the commerce clause).

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

#386

Post by refulgentis »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #379
heavyset_go wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, manufacturers' interests are often not aligned with retail customers' interests. For example, with Tesla, the company optimizes delivery numbers of cars sold by sacrificing quality control, and their service center model is anemic and almost an afterthought, especially when it comes to addressing the QC issues their customers experience. For every Tesla with 400k miles on them with a few thousand dolla…

Dealerships are rent seeking entities that exist purely due to laws that force consumers to deal with them and only them. They are not in either consumer or manufacturers interest.

This is an extreme absolutist position that seems immediately falsified by the detailed and nuanced post it is in reply to

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

#387

Post by bombcar »

dixie_land wrote: post #339
antiterra wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’ve had employees tell me to do exactly that because an online order counts as good toward the store’s metrics (or at least not bad) but a price match counts against them.

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

#388

Post by TulliusCicero »

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-...

Man, I wish. Dealerships are plague.

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

#389

Post by bombcar »

yourapostasy wrote: post #350
sammalloy wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking about the difference between commercial and commuter use. We both know that they are not the same at all, and have different manufacturing environments, parts, builds, and specs. Clearly, this discussion is not about commercial vehicles. Go look at the list of most reliable cars. Toyota and Honda are always listed as number one and two. Ford isn’t ever discussed as "reliable". I think this goes way bey…

Wow, I was not expecting Ford transit vans to be above-average reliable, but a bit of searching around shows that indeed they are. Not as reliable as a Mercedes Sprinter, but I wonder if the operating costs are lower over the years (they cost roughly the same, which also surprised me) than the Mercedes.

Mercedes is actually quite price competitive.

And commercial vehicles live in a different world where companies actually track TCO and friends.

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

#390

Post by wumpus »

imroot wrote: post #362
wumpus wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One commonly said counterpoint is that having independent dealers means you get better warranty service. Here's how it works. I had a Subaru, and Subaru had a problem for a decade+ that their head gaskets were tissue paper and frequently failed. So I had one free replacement mid-warranty. I went in just after the warranty expired for a normal service and lo and behold, the head gasket was bad again. The dealer replac…

Dealers have almost wide latitude about submitting and getting paid for "good will" warranty claims, as long as they don't abuse it. Sometimes manufactures will direct dealers to fix things that are long out of warranty when weird things happen (like in Seattle when that radio station sent out a bug that bricked the radios over RDS -- the manufacture directed the dealerships via a service memo to replace the radios a…

All car companies have "service memos". It has nothing to do with dealers.
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