Ford CEO Wants to Abolish the Dealership Experience as We Know It | Hacker News Reader

Ford CEO Wants to Abolish the Dealership Experience as We Know It

jalopnik.com

8 pointsnradov9 comments

Buying a car is probably one of the worst buying experience anyone has to deal with. Most of the time you deal with the hard sell and you always feel like you got ripped off.

Buying online is great but I think people still need a way to experience the car before it's bought. They should turn the dealers into showrooms.

GM tried to do something similar with the saturn but ultimately it failed. I suspect it had something to do with the blandness of the car. They seemed like the car your teacher or grandfather would buy. It was safe and cost effective.

If ford wants to get a foot hold they should start with the high end sports cars and slowly introduce cars for the everyone. It would take a long time to change the culture but at least things would change.

I agree that no-haggle, pay-for-feature pricing works. There was a reason Saturn was successful in the marketplace when it first launched, despite the cars themselves being ho-hum. Things turned south with Saturn when they moved away from their no-haggle pricing model and GM & the UAW tried to convert the Spring Hill production facility back to the "GM way": https://www.forbes.com/2010/03/08/saturn-gm-innovation-leade...

Sounds great, good luck getting the dealers on board. Why would they want to give up gouging consumers?

If Ford can make an end run around the dealers (or even the existing dealers), and doing so increases Ford's sales, and it also makes life better for customers... then who cares what the dealers want? They can "not like it" all they want. What they like is irrelevant.

Auto dealerships look like a business that is just begging for disruption.

The short answer is they paid off all the local politicians who make those pro-dealership laws.

If the dealer orgs don't want to trade in profit for becoming a customer service center then it's gonna be hard. Ford doesn't own that real estate.

Can’t buy something like a car without sitting in it and probably doing a test drive. Unless they have a 3-5 day no questions asked full price refund policy.

You can rent one.

Very hard to do for new/popular cars. When the Honda Pilot was introduced, there was no dealer stock. They used the 3-day full refund no questions asked method of selling them unseen. Wasn’t always accepted but as they had nothing to sell, it was not a great loss.

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