Since all the comments I've seen thus far have been anti-dealership, I thought I should provide one single solitary reason for dealerships. Before I do- I've never worked at a dealership, or a car company, nor owned a car, nor have I driven a car in over twenty years, so I have almost no skin in this game other than my wife and I bought a car last year.

The one thing dealerships do is that they do have a very slight incentive to address issues related to recalls. This is because dealerships are incentivized to do recalls because these service calls are covered by their agreements with the manufacturer as an independent entity, where as a company owned site would not be.

It could then be argued that dealerships provide some level of accountability to manufactures to be independent in reporting defects.

I think this is a weak argument and does not justify the existence of dealerships, but it is a real argument nonetheless, even if it's not sufficient to justify its own existence.