71–80 of 363 posts
I'm trying to buy two cars right now, and this has put a big wrench in the process. The dealership can't tell me what's on their lot compared to what's on their Website, except by going out and searching.
Wow sounds awful for them. They might have to get up from their desks.
This is what happens when a single player (CDK Global) has massive market share (90% when measured by number of vehicles sold [0] --- EDIT: this is actually the combined market share of CDK + Reynolds, who have a non-compete agreement ---). The entire industry becomes fragile to product issues and/or malicious attacks. Anti-trust is important. [0] https://casetext.com/case/loop-llc-v-cdk-global-llc-in-re-de...
Also, the vendor becomes insulated from customer demands. Why patch things or work your ass off, when none of your customers have an alternative? (especially if PE buys the business or CEOs get a stock price focus and gut engineering to keep-the-lights-on levels)
Related note: car stealerships are a relic of the past. There is no reason why a middleman should exist when buying a car. Consumers should have the option to purchase directly from the manufacturer. I am personally not a fan of Tesla as a vehicle, but I admire the business model of buying directly from Tesla. Stealerships are a drain on the consumer. All that land they own can be used for productive economic activit…
Related note: car stealerships are a relic of the past. There is no reason why a middleman should exist when buying a car. Consumers should have the option to purchase directly from the manufacturer. I am personally not a fan of Tesla as a vehicle, but I admire the business model of buying directly from Tesla. Stealerships are a drain on the consumer. All that land they own can be used for productive economic activit…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is kind of a crazy model. You don't go to the Pepsi store for Pepsi and the Coke store for Coke. The exclusivity dealerships get enshrined in law is kinda nuts. Still, I think there is something to be said for independent dealerships overall for service quality. Trying to get a Tesla serviced is still something of a nightmare. In comparison the service departments of dealerships have are much more robust.
Everyone I know IRL never gets their car serviced at the actual dealership, always going to a third party repair shop. Tesla has service issues, I'm not sure that they're related to their lack of dealerships though.
Dealers actually don't know much about their older cars. Try to bring for example a 1990's era (or really anything more than 10 years old or so) Mercedes to a dealer for service, none of their techs have any idea what it is, unless they happen to have an old guy.
Dealership shops are trained and reasonably competent working on newer stuff that's under warranty coverage. Older than that, you can often get better workmanship and cheaper prices with an independent.
Related note: car stealerships are a relic of the past. There is no reason why a middleman should exist when buying a car. Consumers should have the option to purchase directly from the manufacturer. I am personally not a fan of Tesla as a vehicle, but I admire the business model of buying directly from Tesla. Stealerships are a drain on the consumer. All that land they own can be used for productive economic activit…
> Consumers should have the option to purchase directly from the manufacturer. They should have the option , sure. But what difference do you think this makes in reality? The process ends up being the similar. > but I admire the business model of buying directly from Tesla A lot of people don't want to buy a $40,000+ item online. Tesla understands this, which is why they opened "showrooms" to have real people walk yo…
The difference is the price listed is the price you pay. There's not an environment where the dealer is injecting whatever BS fee or piss poor financing they can to milk out every extra cent from the customer.
The manufacture is incentivized to sell these cars at the advertised price.
So many of us were quick to move paper-based systems (voting, orders, kiosks, parking meters, journals, requests, etc) over to computers – without accounting for the e2e cost and flakiness of the software-based system.
This is what happens when a single player (CDK Global) has massive market share (90% when measured by number of vehicles sold [0] --- EDIT: this is actually the combined market share of CDK + Reynolds, who have a non-compete agreement ---). The entire industry becomes fragile to product issues and/or malicious attacks. Anti-trust is important. [0] https://casetext.com/case/loop-llc-v-cdk-global-llc-in-re-de...
> CDK Global has massive market share 90% when measured by number of vehicles sold I suspect we're missing some nuance in that 90%. US dealerships are dominated by UCS(Reynolds&Reynolds) and CDK. ADP and DealerTrack have a fair amount. I used to provide support for three of those.