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Comment by phpthrowaway99 | Hacker News Reader

People have been saying this for 20 years. Yet car salespeople are more important than ever from what I've seen. But let's ignore that because you could argue it's just opinion.

My favorite example/rebuttal to this is: Imagine a car sales evolves to basically vending machines. You walk up to the box, pick a car, swipe your card, and a roll-up door opens and your car pops out. Amazing! No salespeople needed. Every town just gets a few vending machine!

Then one day, one vending machine owner decides to pay a bright kid to stand next to the vending machine in case the people have questions. Sales would go up at that vending machine. Soon all vending machines have a salesperson standing next to them helping people. And we're back to where we started.

(Unless you think a smart helpful person standing next to the vending machine would make sales go down I suppose... But this is against everything I've seen selling thousands of cars)

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Who was saying this 20 years ago? eCommerce was barely a thing back then. Smartphones, YouTube and Twitter didn't exist. The only people who knew about new cars and their features were enthusiasts who got a dozen magazine subscriptions.

The difference is that today there are actually companies successfully following this model, Tesla being the most prominent example. All other manufacturers want to cut down on the mandatory middlemen fees (and have publicly said it - https://web.archive.org/web/20220629075106/https://www.nytim...). It's a matter of when, not if, they will get to it.

People have been saying this since dealerships stared buying internet leads. I started in 2008. Even then internet departments were fully built out and everyone was worried about the end of salespeople for several years. So yes, even back in 1999 you could email a dealership and work multiple salespeople against each other. And that made people talk about the end of salespeople, negotiated prices, and dealerships.

Even Tesla has a lot of salespeople, at corporate and at the showcase stores. You just can't get a discount from them.

If someone built a car vending machine, it would only be a matter of time until someone noticed you can make sales go up at the vending machine by putting someone standing next to it.

As others have noted, Saturn Corporation was an automobile company which was premised on no-hassle sales, and was founded in 1987.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Corporation>

I recall a number of stories of "automobile vending machines", and believe there may have been some early instances based out of Dubai or China, though the earliest online stories I'm finding presently are from the 2012--2014 period, about one decade ago, not two. That said, the concept surely occurred to someone prior to that.

Wired, 2014: <https://archive.ph/JkbfK>. Chinese EV rental by Kandi. Discussed on Slashdot at the time: <https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/28/1630208/next-carsha...>

And an early story about Carvana from 2013, via The Car Connection: <https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1088617_would-you-buy-...>

Google Books finds a snippet from a 1990 book, here: <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Implementing_Japanese_A...>

"Think back to the Automobile Vending Machine concept presented earlier...", in Implementing Japanese AI Techniques: Turning the Tables for a Winning Strategy by Richard Tabor Greene.

A smart helpful person is one thing. Someone whose pay cheque depends on convincing people to buy a car even if it's not the right one for them is something else entirely.

Dealerships try to hire smart helpful people that can sell 30+ cars a month like I did. They don't always succeed, just like most companies can't hire the best programmers consistently either.

In most industries salesmen are rewarded long term for selling you the right thing even if it isn't the most profitable today. However in the case of cars you buy one and odds are the next one will be a different brand and thus new dealer, even if it is the same brand you can choose a different dealer.

I don't doubt what you're saying. I also assume the bright kid is lying or making it up. This is not just for car sales, but any salesman. If I can't find it out myself, I have no reason to ask the bright kid. Sometimes I ask them a token question to see if they'll lie to me.

I'd buy from the vending machine in a hot minute. But I might be a freak.

To be fair, my most recent car buying experience was just fine. It was a new Subaru, just as the pandemic was starting and they had a lot of excess inventory. We paid the asking price, but it was close enough to the best price we could find from our research. The finance salesman pushed every possible add-on, and we simply countered with "let us take the brochure home and figure out what we want to do." At the end we wrote a check for the car with no extra goodies and drove away.

Even the grocery stores with good self-checkouts have someone there to resolve issues and answer questions. I wouldn't use a self-checkout that didn't since I'd have to hope someone working the day I had trouble was trained on the system.

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