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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

The current monthly recurring charges thing and making it difficult to cancel is similar to the hard, six hour-plus your purchase of a car at a dealership. If I had to go through that with, say, a grocery store or even a restaurant I’d never go back to either. The only thing that makes the hard sale remotely feasible for a car retailer is the infrequency of purchasing a car.

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I wonder about this.

I've never bought a car from a used car yard or new car dealership, so I can't talk from experience.

In Australia, residential real estate sales contract have a mandatory 28 day minimum cooling off period. I don't know anything about commercial real estate, so can't comment on that.

In a way it makes some sense that the other large purchase(s) in life should have a somewhat protracted sales experience. If you could walk in to a car sales yard and just buy a car chip and pin style, I suspect things could go downhill quite rapidly.

I haven't really thought this through very much, so I'm wide open to head different perspectives.

I ordered my last two cars online. The more recent one was delivered to my house. I spent a few minutes signing paperwork and we were done. There’s no reason the experience has to be anything more than that.

That's fair.

I'm just wondering whether there's scope for a cooling off period for vehicle purchases?

I have at least one friend who might have benefited from such a thing.

That’s not really the nature of the problem with purchasing a car.

That seems like a separate issue. Even with hours at a dealer, at the end you make a decision, sign, and that’s it. (Unless the dealer is kind enough to have a refund policy, anyway.)

Ordering online, I had a period where I could cancel the order with no penalty.

let me guess, a Tesla?

Good guess. I’m not sure if anyone else does home deliveries.

enjoy it. car's a beast (all 3 models)

Oh yes, they’re great. The home delivery was a 3, and the one before that was an S. To quote Mr. Bueller, “If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”

I've heard that a lot of dealerships are willing to do it if they think that you won't actually buy it in person (i.e. deliver the car or lose the sale). I'm not sure there's a set formula for convincing them of that, though.

The car purchase I referred is deeply confrontational. They want to force you to buy a car at the worst possible terms.

hopefully we'll be turning away from models like these. I believe deep down that "nature finds its way" (so to speak) for disruptors to change that.

that's what's the loveliest thing about the internet - for a shitton of things, the cost of entry is 0 now

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