471–480 of 612 posts
Sure, some dealerships are solid but when ‘used car salesman’ is a trope, you have a problem. The current supple deficit and resulting dealer markups are a direct result of a short term perspective that damages the overall brand in the long run.
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The Lightning seems to be designed to convert F-150 buyers. It looks just like a regular F-150 and comes with features rural customers would love, like powering your house during blackouts and your tools away from an outlet.
It's not designed to convert existing F150 buyers. It's designed to get the guy who has a Tesla and a Tacoma in his driveway and who sees fullsize domestic trucks as a penis extension for backwards hicks to trade both those in. This isn't about converting existing owners. It's about growing the potential market.
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> the company optimizes delivery numbers of cars sold by sacrificing quality control How do you know this? Did you see their internal data? There are lots of anecdotes going around about Tesla's quality. However, with all the TeslaQ it is hard to believe that there is real correlation between anecdotes and data. Here are my anecdotes - I owned 6 Teslas over last several years. Not one of them had any QC issues. I had…
>I owned 6 Teslas over the last several years. ??????? Why on earth would you need this many Teslas? Maybe if you are buying so many teslas then it makes sense why you don't need them serviced - you barely give them enough time to wear themselves out!
Isn't this also terrible for the environment? The resources it takes to make one car is a lot.
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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…
Excuse my ignorance, but how I understand is that ICE can't be sold directly to the customers, so that's why dealerships exists (?), so my question is, are EV not regulated or treated differently than ICE?
Telsa insisted on it's direct sales model and it was more politically expedient for regulators in many states to carve out an exception to the dealership requirement only for car companies that sell EV's exclusively (only tesla at the time).
While I suppose this didn't seem like a huge threat to the car dealership lobby in each state at the time it's clearly come back to bite them and is the main reason Fords Electric vehicle production and distribution is a different 'car company' on paper, so that they can take advantage of legislation designed for tesla.
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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…
> the company optimizes delivery numbers of cars sold by sacrificing quality control How do you know this? Did you see their internal data? There are lots of anecdotes going around about Tesla's quality. However, with all the TeslaQ it is hard to believe that there is real correlation between anecdotes and data. Here are my anecdotes - I owned 6 Teslas over last several years. Not one of them had any QC issues. I had…
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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…
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…
You need an actually random sampling of delivered Teslas to determine how extensive QC issues are and whether the average one can go 400k km with only $3k servicing. Also, they defects reputed to vary substantially over time (e.g. one model year might have 5x the rate of two years later).
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…
Selling online without negotiated price is a big change. That should make the dealerships really uncomfortable in the long run… he's kind of saying "oh the dealerships could rent out Mustangs" but is that actually realistic?
If banking and Everything else is a good example, people are getting used to buy online.
I bought even my current car without seeing it before.
I bought my bike online as well.
If more and more do that dealerships might loose too much revenue anyway to keep them afloat.
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All manufacturers can suffer from poor repair times, not only Tesla. Especially these days. I waited six months for a brake booster replacement in my Audi SQ5 as it sat in the service center. They did give me a loaner the whole time though...
Tesla had very poor repair times even before the supply chain issues, much worse than other makes.
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…
In many other parts of the world, even North America, the MSRP is the price of the car. There is no negotiating (at least, not upwards, and definitely not usually). I don't understand why this is newsworthy? I bought a non-EV in the last decade by putting the order together online on the manufacturer's national website, then processing it through a dealership. Buying a car in the US was so unnecessarily stupid becaus…
If you haven't bought a car in the last year or so then you're out of the loop. Stock is low and prices are above MSRP pretty much across the board. For especially in demand cars like the Lighting or Toyota RAV4 Prime the "dealership markup" can be 50% more than MSRP or more.