Yes please.
Anything that will get us closer to direct-to-consumer sales of cars. I'm ready for car dealerships to be a relic of the past.
Anything that will get us closer to direct-to-consumer sales of cars. I'm ready for car dealerships to be a relic of the past.
As an aside, I just ordered a mattress site unseen from an online only company, and it turned out to be one of the best mattresses I've ever slept in. https://www.saatva.com/ $1000 for the luxury firm Queen, and that included shipping and taking the old one.
Repeat 2-3x, pick the lowest price dealer and be willing to walk out the door if anything funny comes up.
Also quite a few dealerships are directly or indirectly part of a franchise so they won't compete with each other. In that case you usually need to expand your radius to ~100mi. Here in PNW there's great Subaru competition but when we looked at Mazda they didn't haggle at all until we went to dealers in a different state.
Pretty transparent and only changed once we started emailing dealers across state lines. Either way they lost our business. Subaru on the other had has a pretty diverse set of dealers and we ended up with one well below "inventory"(that's a whole nother bit of misinformation) at a dealership ~15mi away.
That said Tesla still wipes the floor with any dealership experience I've had which is why I'm pretty excited to see the Model 3 hit the market and more people experience it.
I also ordered mine because we wanted a specific set of options like adaptive cruise control, upgraded sound system, but no navigation and a very specific color combination that we couldn't find anywhere.
Our other car is a Tesla and while I prefer ordering online and checking out with a credit card, emailing multiple dealers was pretty painless.
EDIT: If you're curious why we didn't want navigation, this video explains it pretty well: https://youtu.be/hCDt02UXzkQ Not to mention it's really expensive, hard to input destinations, I generally know where I'm going, and phones work great.
I was very pleasantly surprised that with the touch-screen, which supported swipe and seemed generally (though not-quite) as responsive as an iDevice, and CarPlay, most of the ugly edges/sharp corners of a typical auto infotainment system were gone, and it generally seemed very good.
I will say that CarPlay has the potential to be very good, but it's still very basic for now, and needs a lot more work before its as good as standard iOS. It was particularly nice, though, to use Apple Maps while listening to music on Spotify!
I think that's actually a feature, less possibilities to distract a driver with.
* the navigation is crippled. You can't even scroll the map. But why could you--you can't even scroll the map on the iPhone.
* it connects only via a cord. Bluetooth connects automatically and wirelessly.
* it is filled with glitches. Sometimes it hangs or pressing buttons does nothing.
* many apps are poorly thought out. For instance the list of stations in Pandora is always in alphabetical order, rather than showing recent stations first, and the only way to change stations is to scroll through this massive list.
I have mostly abandoned CarPlay and use my iPod hooked up by the cord for music, and the phone in a holder for navigation and Bluetooth phone.
Last car I bought was through an online auction. Didn't actually see the car in person until I went to pick it up.
I eventually went to the Toyota dealership because although they wouldn't negotiate via email, they didn't phone me either. When I told that to the salesman, he said that he could get in trouble for that because he was supposed to call.
Like every other car buying experience I've had, buying the Toyota sucked. They want to know what payment I want and all I want them to tell me is the out-the-door price. We would go back and forth and eventually they would bring some paperwork with an offer and they had accidentally changed the term from 48 to 60 months. Whoops! I think it ended up taking close to 3 hours to come to an agreement.
To this day, I'm still getting emails and phone calls from some of the dealers I initially contacted and there seems to be no way to make it stop. I would happily pay a small premium to buy from Amazon or direct if I could avoid giving my details to a local dealer.
That reminds me, I'm always getting junk mail and phone calls from scammers trying to sell me some aftermarket warranty. How did they get my name, phone, address, and car information? Is that a public record? The dealer swears they don't sell or share their customer lists.
Maybe you weren't insistent enough? Many dealers don't like negotiating over email, but they also hate to lose a potentially valuable lead. If you make it absolutely clear that you'll only negotiate a certain way (e.g. via email with OTD price quotes), most will play ball.
I'd also suggest starting with a service like TrueCar. The prices they give are generally not the best you can get, but it makes for a good starting point for the email negotiations. I also used CarWoo in the past, but they've closed down. Edmunds has a similar service, though I haven't tried it.
In all of their items they say: We will share your data with qualified partners.
I was also thinking DMV records might be public.
that's why i always use an different email/google voice for dealing with these sleaz- ahem, persistent salesmen
People talk as though the "get quotes by email" thing makes buying a car painless but the simple fact is that it's still a minefield.
My experience with Honda dealers (sales and service) has been so awful that I doubt I will buy another Honda, even though I generally like the car.
The Kia dealer I talked didn't have a car with the upholstery I was interested in and I found out later that the quote they gave me included a charge for taking the car to a local guy and getting the seats re-upholstered.
My wife bought an Acura and so far that dealership seems very good. If they keep treating us right, that's where I'll buy my next car.
I think Saturn showed that the model most consumers want is going to have to come from a non-incumbent who doesn't have the baggage of existing dealers.
So, although I believe the model is appealing to some (or many), I do like the guiding hand of a salesperson to help me navigate many makes, models and options. It's more of a personal choice, and definitely it's unnecessary for say Teslas. I feel the car salesperson is not just something to be disrupted and eradicated, but to evolve into a more modern counterpart, like the people at shift.com.
OTOH, car dealership mafias should definitely die.
Then you should pay for someone to offer you that service. He would be more likely to be impartial too.
A good salesman would be good for this. My last salesman did not know how to operate the in-dash entertainment system. Information-wise, I would have been better off ordering my car from a kiosk.
The problem is that people love to complain but a lot will simply walk if they go into a dealer and are told the price is the price. There are also still financing and trade-in games that most people don't have the luxury of simply ignoring--in part because they're trying to get themselves into a car they can't really afford.
Also, if it weren't such a racket, you would have a single drive center that sold Chevy, Mazda, Toyota all in once place, and then the dealerships wouldn't have to worry about sending people there. They would compete for people's business.
Obviously there's much better ways this could've been done…
The bottom line is that if you have a figure in mind that's a hard floor, you can just say no; no bargaining required.
The problem, unfortunately, as we learned through some of Tesla's struggles, is that car dealerships are deeply embedded in a bunch of localities through legislation. There are literally written into law as the way consumers needs to buy cars.
So the tough part here is that we consumers would LOVE a better way, but it's going to be a while before this takes nationwide. A few progressive municipalities will, I'm sure, adopt (and make it legal to buy via Amazon Cars), but don't hold your breath for the death of car dealerships in the next ~10 years.
(PS - I deeply hope I'm wrong.)