Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy. Sadly this is believable, I've asked to check out things like remote start and control of heating/cooling, and the sales…
The whole dealership system is parasitic, rentseeking, friction. Tesla might have a point here. Instead of transparently selling a product for fixed price, the dealer system appears based on information asymmetry, haggling, upcharges, finance bullshit, warranty bullshit, subscription bullshit, and many decades of entrenched psyops culture against customers. On top of that, salespeople are often poorly trained on the…
It's really annoying to me because I would love to just pick a dealership and go there for the rest of my life for all things automotive.
I don't like being ripped off but I'm not particularly price sensitive, so I'd love to just show up and pay a reasonable sticker price that was just The Price Everyone Paid and not have this vague haggling system expected, and not have to worry whether I was being ripped because I wanted a particular option. I hate having to think about decisions I don't particularly care about, so I would prefer to constrain my choices to "maker Y's automobiles", be it GM, Ford or Toyota for the rest of my life, so that once I have the capabilities I need out of an automobile there's only one or two choices. I would love the simplicity of the dealer being the default maintainer of my automobile and I just show up once a year or so and they take care of it in a pleasant experience.
It's irksome instead that it feels like they just want to trick you out of as much money as possible up front and that they don't want to have a maintenance department, but are legally required to.