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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

The VW dealer I bought my e-golf from has been harassing me to do my yearly oil change. And each time I have to tell them that no, my car doesn't need an oil change. They still insist on a yearly "service".

I'm sure these dealerships will invent things that need to be serviced yearly.

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Having done a a lot of consulting for car dealerships, I’d wager that it’s more likely that their appointment reminder system is held together by duct tape and baling twine, and getting it to schedule smarter based on the data in the dealer management system is so complicated that it’s probably using default values from when it was first set up 8 years ago.

Oof, so true. Dealer software is stuck in the 90s.

> ...I’d wager that it’s more likely that their appointment reminder system is held together by duct tape and baling twine...

The conventional car industry has coming up on two decades of observing what Tesla did right with their software and customer service experience, and what they screwed up. Tesla is still very vulnerable (QC, capacity, and infrastructure), and that window is closing fast. If conventional car dealerships become economic roadkill in the future, they only have themselves to blame.

The big issue with the traditional car industry is how fragmented it is. OEMs, third party websites, and individual dealerships are not only on different tech stacks, they’re financially independent companies that by and large can’t be forced to work together. It’s not uncommon for OEMs to pay dealerships for data through third party websites, since they lack the ability to share certain types of data directly.

One of Tesla’s advantages is unquestionably their more centralized structure. They can make changes that other OEMs can’t.

It's not engine oil, they want you to come in for a battery oil change.

Headlight fluid too I'm sure.

Clearly people missed the joke.

The lesson here is that rewording a joke doesn't always hit.

Just don’t skip the Blinker Fluid checkups

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