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Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

But if dealers no longer add enough value to the process of buying a car, doesn't that just mean that they either have to find new value to add or simply cease to exist because their business model is no longer viable?

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Whenever people bring up how the big old automakers are going to eat Teslas lunch any day now, they leave out the dealership factor. It makes the big automakers uncompetitive regardless of how great their product is.

Try to buy any of these new Ford EVs and be ready for a nightmare of sketchy pre-orders and dealer markups all while being treated like dirt while buying a $70k car.

To be fair, Tesla itself has quite a bit of sketchy pre-ordering and not exactly a great reputation for treating its customers that well after the sale.

It's not even that, really. Older cars (for the most part) had nothing to update, so it's not like these updates are really taking anything away from the dealers that they were doing before. They are just mad that they aren't able to add a new revenue stream by being the only place to go to get software updates.

Older cars do have firmware, which may require updates.

new cars don't have firmware?

That's why I added (for the most part). But outside of recalls, it would have been very rare for any firmware to be updated.

Or lobby politicians for laws which entrench their position at the expense of wider society.

In a free market, that would be the case. But because of a bunch of laws similar to this proposed one, it's basically illegal for most automakers to not have dealers.

That's one of the strategies behind the Tesla model.

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