Tesla finds a loophole in states where dealerships are forbidden: Tribal lands
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I find this so fascinating. I think there comes a point where an achievement is so monumental, that people stop comprehending it as a person's achievement and instead view it as a historical event. Then the achievement becomes "inevitable", because it was the march of history pushing the achievement forward.
Being the CEO of a successful car company is an achievement. But revolutionizing the car industry itself is "inevitable".
If you take an external observer perspective that collectively internal and external pressures cause individuals with talent and drive to go and tackle that problem.
For example, even if you personally did absolutely nothing, Apple will still collectively create some new fangled device with new features, new performance etc etc. That’s literally true of every human endeavor - no person is doing it alone regardless of how pivotal they may seem. So then the question is “how pivotal is Musk personally”. Certainly Tesla existed outside of him but I think his accomplishment there was to make EV cars sexy and grow that industry from nothing despite headwinds. Would it have happened without him? Not sure. I’m not as bullish as the author given how Tesla really was a motivating force for them to get the show on the road and government regulations in the space are a joke (vs what is actually needed) and even still manufacturers are dragging their feet.
So I think the author is right that “it would have happened anyway” but wrong about the scale of the specific impact Musk has had through Tesla.
The actual achievement should look like how Apple nailed the modern smartphone form-factor. Hardware-wise, LG did it first with their Prada phone, but Apple polished it with matching software and UX. Even though each component was already explored by others, Apple still had to come up with a working combination. That's an achievement.
Anyways, back to Tesla. Tesla didn't really achieve anything about EV. The real achievement of Tesla is car-as-smart-platform (which engulfs the entirety of self-driving). AFAIK, this is difficult on ICE cars due to mechanical and business reasons, but Telsa could avoid them by building on EV. Now this is a real new thing. IIRC, this is also what Elon has always been emphasizing. It's more than just an EV company.
It took nearly two hours of people telling me I was an idiot for not taking the extended leather steering wheel warranty etc before getting out of there.
Both of these experiences were at official Hyundai dealerships.
To be fair, this was my experience buying a Subaru in Wyoming. The paperwork was then signed, I pushed back on one or two fee line items, they were removed with apologies and I was offered a beer.
I did later get screwed by the dealership when I was tired of doing my own maintenance after having replaced the timing belt on my truck and let the wife take it in for service and they literally replaced every fluid in the vehicle including brake fluid on a 2 year old vehicle, a $900 service.
Of course that comes at the cost of customer experience.
In Europe discounts are much lower, and prices are a lot more set in stone.
However, the key caveat here is that most people don't know what they're doing.
So in the US 80% of the population is robbed so that the 20% can take advantage.
In Europe everyone gets a worse deal, but it's never going to be super bad.
Pick your poison :-)
"What's the best price you can give me?"
"Sir, we advertise our lowest prices up front so you don't have any pressure to haggle."
"You can do better than that price."
"... Let me see what I can do."
I believe he got a grand knocked off when it was all said and done.
The other dealers focus a little more on the experience and will haggle a bit with you. They usually don’t use high pressure tactics but won’t give you the lowest price.
I also find the personalities of used car salesmen to be so grating that I'd rather do it all over email.
Haggling is defiantly a thing in the UK you wouldn't buy a car for sticker price.
Ordering a BMW was an even more pleasant experience and haggling for 6% off was easier than when I did it with my Jeeps.
> I just shut the finance guy down immediately
> Ordering a BMW
These facts paint a pretty obvious picture of why car buying is a much more pleasant experience for you than most: you have experience, you have options, you don't have a lot of patience, and you are willing to loudly signal those things "immediately," leaving no metaphorical door open for a metaphorical foot to slide into.
If someone else is reading this it's worth taking into account when you deal with a higher ticket item than you usually would: in those situations, being polite is a huge disadvantage and a good salesperson will take a mile for every micrometer you give them.
What you have to do is agree to financing (with no prepayment penalties) in exchange for a discount, and then, before you get the first bill you pay the car off in full.
Insurance would have been more than the monthly car payment, and when I expressed that $400/mo wasn't awful, but $1,000/mo for a car was a non-starter, the guy was seriously like "Well, do you want to eat food, or have a car (with lighted cup holders) to get to work?" and "If you can't afford rent, you can sleep in the car!"
That's still one of the dumbest conversations I've ever had.
So basically: it's a culture thing. High pressure tactics are entrenched on the sales culture side, and the customer culture has gotten used to tolerating them.
As an aside, IIRC, someone once told me that Japanese makeup is superior to and cheaper than Western makeup, because Japanese customers are picky and won't put up with less.
The concept of dealerships makes some sense to me: an individual retail customer has zero leverage with a mass market manufacturer, but they'll have more leverage with a smaller dealer, and the dealer will have more leverage with the manufacturer because they're buying far more than a single person. Though the actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
Tesla organizes test drives too. And you can bring your Tesla in for maintenance (well not in these states obviously). So, it's not like you don't get any service.
It's the protectionism that is bad. Without it, more manufacturers would cut out the middle man and sell directly. Because why give that big of a cut to a middle man you don't need?
The service they offer is convenience and possibly peace of mind(over an owner sale), but they sure do take an arm and a leg for it.
Just call a dealers finance department and find out if they sell standalone warranty and get a quote (you may need to provide a sample VIN). Make sure they are quoting the official manufacturer warranty coverage (new car) vs some BS third party warranty.
If you do this in advance you can fight off the finance guy easily and (more often) get them to price match to keep your business. This method has saved me thousands.
knowing that warranty can be purchased separately for brand itself is a great way to beat up the finance guy, as that may be where they expect to make the bulk of their profit (although nowadays it may be “market adjustment” and other BS fees)
If I want to place an order for a vehicle (not buy one off their lot), the dealer does nothing but still makes a cut.
Not to mention, the majority of folks selling cars (even new cars) are some of the slimiest you'll meet. They are masters of manipulation.
This short NPR piece provides more information: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135633742/economists-hate-ca...
P.s. example of manipulation: some years back I bought a used Honda Civic. The 4th person I got passed to made sure to tell me "the civic is the most stolen car in the US", while trying to sell me on some aftermarket alarm system. I of course knew this was an intentionally misleading statistic, but I'm sure many folks could fall for it.
> If I want to place an order for a vehicle (not buy one off their lot), the dealer does nothing but still makes a cut.
I'm pretty sure this is the same in Europe, or at least in France. Even if I wanted to buy a local make, say a Renault, I don't know how I'd go about getting in touch with the manufacturer directly instead of going through a dealership.
Now I've never actually bought a new car, only motorcycles. And even though it's the same process (I don't think I can order a Honda nor a BMW "direct"), the dealerships didn't try to make me buy useless options.
The difference is that manufacturer-owner dealership is basically not an option in US.
My local Toyota dealership is owned by Toyota. Some other ones are just "licensed" to be their official dealerships, so not owned by Toyota.
In US the "licensed" one can decide "well, the car is rare" (and in pandemic that was every car), here is extra 10-20% dealer markup just because we can. In EU, customer would just go to official Toyota one that doesn't do shit like that
Volkswagen even offers you the option to fetch your vehicle from their factory in Wolfsburg (tour included, drinks cost extra) instead of having it delivered.
Strong wording for something that is not true. You can bypass them by getting a Tesla.
To me this is a bogus argument because with Tesla you don't have the other option. Well, you kind have it but Tesla showrooms/service centers are usually a shitty experience in terms of "a salesman caring for you". Anyway, I'm from Europe and I guess that the car dealership experience is pretty different (I know the US ones just by movies and Monkey Island)
Also, my experience at Tesla dealerships has been the best of any dealership (and keep in mind I'm not a musk apologist (quite the opposite), nor own or plan to own a Tesla). They literally give you the keys and let you drive around by yourself, no questions asked. The experience is lower stress than buying a pair of shoes.
Incumbent car manufacturers had no particular incentive to upset the applecart, but Tesla had the opportunity to see how insane it was.
Interestingly, BYD has chosen a direct to consumer model here in Australia (if you haven’t heard of them, you soon will). Mercedes has now switched to an agency pricing model where the dealers sell on commission and don’t own the cars, so Mercedes can legally control the retail price.
There is some serious pretzel-thinking going on here somewhere in the halls of power (pretzled, one assumes, by careful application of money). The idea that there needs to be a middle-man is weird. The people who want one less layer of abstraction don't need to justify themselves, the dealers have to be doing a lot more than being not-so-bad to justify a mandatory role in the process.
> "The big achievement, instead, was making direct-to-consumer car sales possible."
This isn't the biggest problem America faces, but the idea of a business needing to "innovate" to sell its product to consumers has to be the most unAmerican sentences I've read in an article. It is hard to get a more petty strike in against capitalism.
What capitalism ? The dealer problem is precisely because in the past dealerships negotiated for a laws that stops free market from happening
Here (in EU) we have anything from manufacturer-led dealership to entirely independent one.
But there laws that make it basically forbidden for manufacturers to sell directly and have a lot of protection for dealerships business. Hence no competition. That was made into slapping extra price over MSRP on rarer cars there. That practice started spanning pretty much all cars during pandemic.
Here is one example
https://www.carscoops.com/2022/11/honda-dealerships-payment-...
> They just provide a service - they have cars available to test drive
... sometimes
> and have a real person to talk to during the purchase
That is almost always clueless about nitty gritty, and just wants to sell you the one they earn most money on.
Many brands learned, the hard way, that clients watch on internet but don't buy a new car by internet. Is a too expensive investment. Most people refuse to talk with a robocall and want a local dealership where they can return if they have troubles.
Brands are always trying to reduce the number of official dealerships, to discover later that their business has run dry, and are about to be eaten by a bigger brand. Is happening all the time.
Car dealers have discovered they can make huge profits by exploiting the inventory shortage. They’ve also kept some of the most arrogant sales staff (“closers”) who are guaranteed big pay days for every sale.
While this isn’t always the case, the days of paying below MSRP appears to be a thing of the past
Calling the sales department and asking for market adjustment and dealer adds info for make/model is also recommended. Most sales people, although not all, will disclose rough numbers.
We went to Honda instead, and paid MSRP. They were only 3 months out, but nobody above us in line wanted the color of the next one that came in so we got it in a month.
A lot of people want to be able to buy a car the way they buy almost any other consumer product: easily, for a set price they can research ahead of time. Dealerships stand in the way of that.
If Tesla truly wants to remain a luxury brand forever, its market cap should reflect that.
It shouldn't be the market cap of the next Toyota (car maker) and Panasonic (battery maker) combined and multiplied by 10.
The Model 3 was launched in July 2017, about 5.5 years ago. Unveiling in April 2016, more than 6.5 years ago. During the unveiling, if I'm not wrong, they announced the $35k Model 3. In 2019 they actually released the $35k Model 3, as more of a publicity stunt, since they pulled it after only 2 months.
Back then €1 was about $1.2, so that price would have been about €24k.
Instead, in the real world of today, where €1 is less than $1, the cheapest Model 3 you can buy in Europe is about €54k.
So at the new exchange rate, it's more than twice as expensive, and even with the old exchange rate, it would have still been $45k (about 30% more expensive).
So the "Model 2" will actually be around the price that was promised for Model 3.
More than that, Tesla is notoriously unreliable regarding forecasts. At this point I don't think the Model 3 will ever be back to $35k/€35k.
And this new "Model 2" will probably be launched 10 years from now and it will cost what the Model 3 was supposed to cost, back in 2017.
I don't know about you, but I don't make my plans around stuff that takes 15 years to be ready (5.5 years until now + the likely 10 more years it takes them to launch it).
That was being said about literally every Musk venture, either failed or successful.
>The Model 3 was launched in July 2017, about 5.5 years ago. Unveiling in April 2016, more than 6.5 years ago. During the unveiling, if I'm not wrong, they announced the $35k Model 3. In 2019 they actually released the $35k Model 3, as more of a publicity stunt, since they pulled it after only 2 months.
>Back then €1 was about $1.2, so that price would have been about €24k.
>Instead, in the real world of today, where €1 is less than $1, the cheapest Model 3 you can buy in Europe is about €54k.
>So at the new exchange rate, it's more than twice as expensive, and even with the old exchange rate, it would have still been $45k (about 30% more expensive).
Blame ECB (for currency value drop) and supply and demand. Turns out enough people want to buy 35k€ vehicle for 54k€.
>And this new "Model 2" will probably be launched 10 years from now and it will cost what the Model 3 was supposed to cost, back in 2017.
Yeah, but who cares? The purchasing power of that will be equal to what it would have cost based on original estimates.
We call that "vaporware", not worth discussing.
Now, when it fell about 50%. I was just behind the news.
At a certain point this graph was true: https://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/US-Tesla-m...
Which was just insane.
Why do people care about market cap? Because it shows mindshare. It shows what people care about and where investments should go, preorders, a lot of that stuff.
Plus market cap can be converted into money (not 1:1, but still).
Now, that does not mean that you can't get higher, valuable utility from luxury vehicle.
Dealerships make a lot of money via convenience (you’re already here for your 30k service) and just plain ignorance (most people have no idea what makes their car work or what repair cost is fair).
For a car, the oil change was 300 EUR at the dealership, same problem with losing the warranty. In that case it took one hour - no idea why because it takes just 10 minutes of actual work and there was no wait time to cool the engine and oil, they were almost cold.
In the case of Tesla, it is more accurate to say that they are their own dealer since they provide services like financing and registration. They even have their own insurance. Of course, these services are not free, and neither are test drives and showrooms, they are included in the price of the car.
The difference with the traditional dealership model is that they only sell Teslas, and that they don't want other dealers to sell Teslas. In a sense, they are anticompetitive.
Yes, I am playing devil's advocate here, but that's to say there is a reason for this dealership law.
Isn't this just more middlemen they set you up with, and government bureaucracy that ought to be self-evident?
From what I hear the average dealership is about the worst option, the typical sales swindle of information asymmetry and other adversarial games? I mean, it's basically right there in the name.
Granted, most of my knowledge is second hand..
ie. Trade in price for old car, purchase price for new car, rate of finance, cost of extended warranties.
I don't understand all the complaining about dealerships in this thread, but maybe it's because I'm from the EU.
I own a Tesla and have had no problems with customer service.
What I do have a problem with is negotiating a price for a vehicle from a slimy dealership agent who have a litany of techniques to increase their profit for no good reason. On the Tesla website the price you pay is the price that everyone pays.
I'm hardly a Musk fanboy, in fact I have strong negative opinions about the, er, gentleman, but this push towards flat pricing and allowing sales directly to individuals is imo an unequivocal good. If the price everyone pays is the same online and at the dealerships then dealerships can prove their value to the customer - or not.
https://www.hotcars.com/ford-cracking-down-greedy-dealers-ma...
Apple sets a floor price through razor thin margins but how do they set a ceiling?
Am I wrong?
On the other hand, dealerships also sold future cars - and sometimes still do - when you want to have something customized.
So, there's no difference besides difference in demand.
FWIW, the delivery estimates displayed on the Tesla web site for cars currently in production are pretty accurate. Also, if you order a Performance/Plaid model, you get to the front of the queue. ;-)
> I suspect the spot price for a Tesla now and here is also fluctuating, opaque, and subject to negotiation.
In that case, you're buying a used one from a dealer, so that would be true.
The annoying thing with dealers though is that when it comes to Tesla, they often have no clue what they're actually selling, or they're trying to rip off naive customers. I've seen them try to sell base Model 3's for $55K. For just a couple thousand more, you could get a brand new Model 3 Performance delivered in 2-4 weeks.
Good for you, really. That doesn't invalidate the countless horror stories that prop up on those forums multiple times a day.
https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/tesla-tops-list-most-satisfie...
People negotiate the price of a $40 ride to the airport with taxi drivers every day. I negotiated the price of a pair of prescription glasses just yesterday, and they cost less than $300.
So... yes?
Even in chain stores for hardware/DIY or white goods (fridges, washing machines, etc) there is almost always leeway for haggling to some degree on higher priced items.
He works in the automotive industry, where haggling is basically mandatory - if you don't haggle, you are going to get shafted. Its the same at builders merchants and lumber suppliers.
As opposed to the haggling model where they expect to sell a car for $55K but put a $60K tag on it knowing people will haggle it down to $55K and think they got a good deal.
It's an absolutely shitty model, and it's saddening that you're falling for it.
Dealerships do not set the sticker price. Only manufacturers do. At Tesla, your only option is to pay full sticker. At dealerships, you can certainly do the same, but you can also negotiate a better deal.
Manufacturers (other than Tesla) know people aren't going to pay MSRP.
"Negotiating a better deal" is just bullshit. Honda will throw a $24K MSRP on a Honda Civic knowing people will probably actually pay $22K or whatever.
The problem here is that you think that if Tesla participated in negotiations, then you could get a $63K Model 3 Performance for $58K by negotiating. That is false. What would actually happen is that they would up the sticker price to $68K so you could feel like you got a deal when you drive away after paying $63K.
And if you were on the hook for repairing $50,000+ machines, would you allow the users of those machines to get oil changes and other services just anywhere? Or would you require a minimum level of maintenance and a known quality of parts and fluids?
Dealerships are paid by the manufacturer for new-car warranty service. My experience is they’ll go out of their way to get a warranty repair job as it pays them well and earns goodwill with the customer for a directly profitable job.
This conflates dealerships with the ability/right to repair. I think dealerships are absolute scum but am completely on-board with enabling 3rd party mechanics to repair vehicles.
Dealerships don’t even ensure you don’t have the same vendor lock-in issues (getting modern ICE foreign cars repaired in small cities/towns can be a nightmare).
Lol. Startup. That crutch is long gone. If you are worth more than Ford and Honda combined, there are no excuses.
I.e. they're big but they're operating like a (s)crappy startup.
Every serious VC is like Microsoft.
What you're talking about are not startups, in my opinion, they're mom and pop stores, the ones that don't grow explosively.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-...
People keep saying this but its just not true. Look at their growth in terms of service centers.
And their mobile service fleet is the largest in the US, and reduced the need to bring the car in. And their software capability allows for less trips due to software issue.
Of course their costumer service is not perfect, but given the growth they had its essentially impossible to keep up with customer service.
If you look at other car startups, dealerships also don't fall out of the clear blue sky. Had Telsa built with dealerships they very likely would have had very similar growth problems in terms of service capacity.
> Non-Tesla customers have virtually infinite options, and someone to actually take care of them. I suggest you read even the most die-hard Tesla fansites and see just how bad Tesla's anti-dealership strategy is for the customer.
Only browsing forums where people specifically to complain is selection bias.
And you can find forums like this for lots of dealerships and car companies.
Why are you inserting a moral position here? The world economy runs on middle men. I know of no-one that goes to the local ore mine to build their own car. The industry is literally built on middle men.
If you want to make the argument that there are laws protecting their middle man position that are now out dated that's one thing, but absent that they are obviously providing a service people find valuable.
> They had to work through dealerships as middlemen [...] largely as a way of spreading risk. [...] Those conditions are, arguably, gone today.
Personally I would say car companies are manufacturers. They should concentrate on manufacturing and let the dealerships concentrate on the customer, so I don't really accept the thesis that they're useless.
A dealer buys an unregistered car. Registers, checks, sorts finance, offers after sales support. That is their value add.
their 'value-add' is mandatory and driven by regulation.
it's akin to talking about the TurboTax 'value-add' while failing to mention their anti-consumer efforts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meHYBhcpdvQ
And on that subject.
What may be the best channel on youtube, amazingly well researched, written, shot, presented... and it's a(incredulous tone) motorcycle channel?!
In some cases is an allotment, is a borrow. In other not. The dealerships aren't borrowing cars from the maker, they are "forced" to buy those cars from the maker with their own money, and they resell the cars later to recover the money. Is called a "zero Km" car. The maker is selling the dealership X cars each year, and they are thousands of dealerships in each country, so the maker has thousands of sold cars guaranteed even before the car is the market. Official dealerships are lending money to the brands all the time.
Even after reading your second comment, I have no idea what your complaint is. Again, if it was so awful, the dealerships would abandon the manufacturer.
And then the brands would be eaten or fuse in mega-brands, but this will never hap... oh, wait
> I have no idea what your complaint is.
I'm not complaining, I'm explaining. The relationship between maker and dealership is mutualistic. Both benefit of it. Dealerships exist because they are useful. The maker needs them in the correct amount to survive.
Tesla was a different car and a different case, so maybe it works for them, but is a luxury brand and they still don't sell massively. And they aren't [probably, I could be wrong] selling a lot out of the big cities.
At most I can say I'm vaguely aware that early in US history there were a lot of issues around monopolies/oligopolies (see company towns) that lead to antitrust laws and by extension laws regarding dealerships. But I'd have to do more research to be able to say anything more concrete.
No domestic OEM sprang into existence with billions of dollars in the bank to spin up a nationwide network of showrooms and repair centers. As they were growing production slowly, they had to rely on small businesses around the country to sell their products for them, which also significantly improved capital when they were growing (dealers bought from the OEM, then sold to customers, potentially thousands of miles away from factories). Over time, these businesses became franchised by the OEMs to allow them to exert some control over the customer experience, standardize parts and repair work, etc.
So that's why dealers became a thing in the first place. The tricky bit of the history is why the state laws in favor of dealers came into existence. It's very fuzzy, but in effect the Detroit "big three" became very large and powerful, with enough money to start stepping in with company-owned dealerships. The local franchised dealers, who by that time had also become quite embedded in communities and politics, thought that this was unfair since the OEMs could undercut local dealers on price, thus they lobbied their states to put in place anti-competition laws. And they were successful.
That's about it. As far as I've ever been able to tell, customer experience and monopoly prevention never really factored into it other than as dubious arguments by the dealers themselves. Now here we are ~70 years later and the market has changed significantly, but the protection laws are still there.
Fwiw, dealer margins vary by vehicle and brand, but 5-10% for mass market vehicles is common. That's money the OEMs would rather not pay out to third parties. Dealers also have massive markups on service and love warranty work because they can rake OEMs over the coals with it. The best argument I've seen in favor of dealers is that an OEM-run dealership would be incentivized to some degree to dismiss warranty work as unnecessary, while a franchised dealer tries to find every warranty hour they possibly can. That's about it, though - there's so much brand and 3rd party competition in the market these days that other arguments usually don't make much sense.
I'm not an expert about the auto industry or the auto market or the regulations and their history and I'm in no position to tell anybody here they're wrong. I just wish people would consider the wider context.
Why do these regulations exist? What benefits are there? Downsides? What changes if these regulations are changed or removed? What regulatory changes can be made to improve the state of dealerships?
Maybe allowing manufacturers to run their own dealerships would create more competition and put downward pressure on prices and improve quality of service across the industry.
How do you deal with the threat of manufacturers edging out all private dealerships so that they're the only option? Will the market eventually become worse because of a lack of competition among dealerships? How do you ensure manufacturers don't treat independent dealerships unfairly and exploit the vertical integration in an anticompetitive way? How do you prevent regulatory capture through manufacturers?
All I see here is "dealerships bad". And yes, the examples I've seen are bad and most things I've heard about dealerships really suck. But the best solution isn't necessarily to get rid of independent ones. Maybe it is, maybe it's not (imo, pretty likely not).
That's what we have anti-trust for.
I had a surplus car, researched “fair market” value for private sale versus selling it to a dealership. I was closing up an estate, getting rid of it easily, but fairly was the goal.
It was a 2013 Subaru Impreza with 149,000 miles that I’d have to clean up for sale to a private party, I opted to unload it as a sale to a dealer. Trade in value quoted at three sites (kbb, edmunds, carfax) was $3500. Private party sale was $4100, retail sale that a buyer would pay at a dealer $5200.
Dealer puts new tires on it lists for $9999 and suddenly the three sites list “fair market” retail at $11,000, trade in at $7000 and private party at $9000.
Same VIN entered, same mileage, suddenly the car on the lot is worth more when owned by a dealership according to KBB, Edmunds and Carfax.
On the other hand, dealers usually include a warranty of some kind with their “certified pre-owned” vehicles. And as repeat players, they have a reputation to keep. The manufacturer also imposes further rules on them to protect the car brand.
Fwiw, I strongly oppose laws that protect the dealership business. But this specific thing you’ve noticed is not some grand conspiracy (how would that work anyway?). It’s just rational consumer behavior.
What's weird is that every price jumped after selling the car to a dealer, not that the retail price was higher than the trade-in price.
> Trade in value quoted at three sites (kbb, edmunds, carfax) was $3500. Private party sale was $4100, retail sale that a buyer would pay at a dealer $5200.
> Dealer puts new tires on it lists for $9999 and suddenly the three sites list “fair market” retail at $11,000, trade in at $7000 and private party at $9000.
How much did the tires cost?
It's based on comps. Dealer in your zip listed it at a comical price and it dragged the price up because data was sparse.
> You buy a car from a guy on the street, it could break on the drive home and you’re mostly shit outta luck.
Then why did the private party value double overnight?
Again I highly doubt the dealer in your example did enough to double the price of the car. However I could see them adding a few thousand after their professionals fix and repair cosmetic issues. They usually have people on hand who can do these repairs correctly and cheaper than the retail price they would charge us to fix a single car.
If you actually want a fair price on a trade-in, you'll need to sell it on commission. Less parking, advertising, and expenses to get it into saleable shape -- and you don't get the money upfront while you're trying to whittle down your loan. If you want to just walk away from the car and deduct it from your purchase, you pay dearly for that convenience.
Excuse the bad summary of micro-econ 100.
Cars aren't a commodity which is why there is the potential for a consumer win in negotiation, but it's slight.
It's like gambling against the house. The best ones make it feel like you've won at the same time they suck you dry. You think you got a good price at the dealership when you negotiated the price down, but any good salesman will leave you feeling that way.
You forgot a few words there. I assume it's supposed to say:
>The difference between marginal cost and the price a buyer is [willing to pay] is the consumer surplus.
Eg when the buyer is willing to pay $30 for a box, but the box costs $25 then that's a $5 consumer surplus.
Did I understand it right or did you mean something else?
That's what he meant.
That might just work out well.
> But with 574 federally recognized tribal governments in 35 states, Tesla’s new strategy could do a lot to close that advantage.
Fuck ye!
Tribes have no special privileges to circumvent federal laws unless specifically stated (e.g. Makah whaling rights nullify the Marine Mammal Protection Act) in a treaty.
The rat's nest of auto dealership laws are all at the state level, largely because the other 49 states didn't want Michigan dictating the structure of their transportation sector.
They pretty much universally have extremely low physical infrastructure though, which limits anyone’s interest or ability to set up anything to do business. They also almost universally have extremely low administrative and legal infrastructure, with completely foreign and distinctive customs in each tribe, which really means arbitrary decisions after long negotiations. They are all too small to bother with, for most.
And finally, they almost all universally distrust the entrepreneurs that would show up, because a history of exploitation that got them in this quagmire to begin with.
But if you can imagine it, its likely possible.
There have been or currently are data centers on tribal lands, operating with some theoretical legal edge. Heard it was cumbersome and bad service though.
There are drug running corridors on unique tribes that straddle the US - Canada border with a river running between them.
There are infinite permutations.
Even with things being under Federal law, federal enforcement and federal prosecution has evidence gathering issues as well as obscurity in how to proceed, as well as having to weigh the perpetual political fallout of stirring the nest and symbiosis with the indigenous community. They don’t want some treaty challenged. They don't know how to bother or bring the case or win the case or deal with pursuing the case.
Exhibit A of something that wouldn't apply to all tribes the same because they are too different. Some are more sovereign than others in some aspects. There is nothing uniform about the concept of indigenous lands, but the arbitrage comes from everyone treating them as an amorphous group. Even the most progressive and inclusive people do this, but fortunately it just comes down to reading comprehension. If you can read or are willing to read, you'll find some unchallenged and interesting thing you might be willing to pursue. You likely will have to go to the area to find what to read though, "area" because I'm not willing to call them all "tribes".
https://web.archive.org/web/20221115123055/https://www.kbb.c...