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Two cars in a row on the line are not identical. Options and finish and engine and suspension and extra and milage and maintenance history and colour and metallic or plain.. the idea a car purchase is cookie cutter is probably as flawed as the idea all ThinkPad are the same.

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Weird how customers are able to compare models and purchase in almost all other walks of life

I’m buying my first pickup. These are not cookie-cutter vehicles. The MSRP is a floor for sticker prices. Once you factor in trim levels, packages, engine choices, etc there’s a continuous gradient that runs from MSRP to 2x MSRP or more. When you have specific capacities for towing and payload that you’re after, plus some other options, it gets complex. The manufacturer’s site did not allow faceted search at the level that I wanted, so I wrote software to scrape the inventory, parse the option codes and stick the results in a Sqlite file so I could track inventory in the region.

My point is not that it's easy, or that having a guide is unhelpful.

My point is that the pretend song-and-dance of current car buying is ridiculous and anti-consumer.

And lots of people don't have complex requirements for their vehicles. Size, color, type etc. Which could probably literally be managed via an Amazon-style listing.

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