Ford seems to be testing the waters about how to simplify the car purchase process: https://fordauthority.com/2022/05/ford-dealers-will-likely-s...
There's plenty of dealerships who have historically had simple purchase processes with standard no haggle pricing but often buyers have to do extensive research in order to find such dealerships.
An almost similar thing happened to the F150 Lightning, Ford had to threaten dealers that they would withhold any future deliveries if they caught wind of markups.
The current "markup" phenomenon is the same as the prior experience (pre-pandemic) where OEMs intentionally subsidized the purchase of their vehicles well below MSRP, and savvy customers could negotiate thousands off a car deal. It's mind boggling to me that we allow for such an inefficient market to perpetuate! 100 years of franchise dealerships is enough! Time for business and consumers to wake up and enact change.
Even with all of the might of GM behind it, and with the cars themselves having a distinct position in the market with a few unusual features no other brand had, such as polymer body panels that were lightweight, rust proof and easy to repair (by simply replacing entirely), Saturn only lasted a few years before folding.
I was selling cars myself for a few months during their peak, and recall that they mainly got used as a rhetorical backstop by customers who would bring in an invoice for our vehicle (printed out from edmunds.com, which had just barely become a thing at the time), and argued that they should pay some absurdly small fixed number ($100, $300, possibly $1000 if they were buying an NSX, our "halo" vehicle) over invoice to get a fixed price like saturn.
This was a couple years before dealerships had organically responded to the internet by adding all sorts of hidden costs that do not show up on an invoice to the base price (in addition to the usual ones) so unlike today the invoice was literally our invoice price. But they were not there to buy a Saturn they were there to buy a different brand of car.
They'll make tons of gross profit because their cost infrastructure will go down, and OEMs will be happy because they still won't have to deal with customers and can focus on wholesaling cars to their "dealer" network.
The rub is in the finance and insurance products. OEMs all have captive lending arms, and currently dealers make a ton of money ($1,500+ per vehicle retailed) in finance and insurance profit. Navigating that relationship will be interesting as OEMs take on more control of the sales process.