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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

> Small anecdote: I visited a GM dealership this week and the salesperson told me Super Cruise was not enabled for test drives. The excuse was pretty weak, like the dealership would have to pay for the service or something. GM might have the technology but they are completely bungling the strategy.

Sadly this is believable, I've asked to check out things like remote start and control of heating/cooling, and the sales people cannot show those features off because they require an app + subscription tied to the car.

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Based on my anecdotal experience, another issue is that salespeople are not trained on the tech

I worked on a feature for new vehicles and the company failed in part because buyers simply didn’t know those features were part of the vehicle. Dealers never set it up for the buyer and it wasn’t something many people would think to do on their own

A salesperson isn’t going to jeopardize an easy sale by bungling some fancy new feature they can’t control

I’d guess this is at least half the features on my iPhone. I’m sure it can do things that I’m not even thinking a phone can do, but nobody set anything up, and it’s not very obvious or discoverable.

At least when you purchase an iPhone new, Apple does push a "Personal Setup" session with their staff either in-store or online https://www.apple.com/shop/personal-setup (click the "Feature Focus" tab)

Tesla salespeople can explain this well though. And the cars come equipped and they let you FSD without them in the vehicle. The confidence exhudes

What tesla salespeople? They're pretty well known for flaunting the dealer model. I've never bought a tesla, but from the friends that have bought one one of the big plusses is you don't talk to a salesperson at all, you buy the car at a fixed retail price online. Has this changed recently?

Tesla has lots of showrooms with cars, test drives, and sales people. If you're there and want to buy a car, they direct you to a computer with an Internet connection.

They have a couple people to manage test drives and they will ask if you have any questions and make sure your aware of the current interest rate or other sales incentives but they aren’t sales people in the sense that you would typically be used to.

They have showrooms.

To be fair there isn't much inside a Tesla to yammer on about otherwise.

I don't want to be a jerk but the salesperson couldn't pronounce "autonomous" which tells me they aren't being trained in selling the feature at all. I can't even remember him referring to it by the marketing name.

HN priorities are not real world priorities

People in the real world are not interested in autonomous driving?

I doubt that. They just care less for the technical details.

Hmmm, not when it comes to car.

Salespeople are always trained on the latest features in the auto industry.

Even if they don't get in person training, all carmakers release 1 hour long videos showing the features of their cars for training purposes.

I've bought a bunch of new cars in my life. I've never had a sales person who knew basically anything about the cars they were selling me. I have however had a variety of very good salespeople, their value has never been in explaining the car to me but in making my purchase transaction straight forward and reasonably quick.

All of the sales people could tell me how many doors each car had and what color it was when we stood next to it, but that was about it. Many of them could look up if other near-by dealers had the exact combination of options I wanted.

If sales person training about the actual cars exists, my experience indicates very few new car sales people take advantage of it.

Concur. A Toyota salesperson was once unable to tell me what the highest trim level of a Highlander was and how it differed from the model they had. Seen staggering lack of knowledge in all things, not just tech.

Older example but when I got a second hand Mazda in ~2017, the salesperson I bought it from set up Bluetooth pairing for voice calls via my phone.

As it turned out, the feature was still pretty janky and I only tried it a few times before reverting to just regular speakerphone. And when the battery died and the head unit lost all its config, I never bothered figuring out how to set it up a second time.

The whole dealership system is parasitic, rentseeking, friction. Tesla might have a point here.

Instead of transparently selling a product for fixed price, the dealer system appears based on information asymmetry, haggling, upcharges, finance bullshit, warranty bullshit, subscription bullshit, and many decades of entrenched psyops culture against customers.

On top of that, salespeople are often poorly trained on the products and dealerships seem to have an adversarial relationship with corporate, especially around the corporate website differing from the local story.

And then the dealerships steer you for whatever benefits them. In 2017 I tried to test drive a Chevy Bolt: Motortrend's car of that year. One dealer hadn't even heard of it. Another said he couldn't get one. Another tried to dissuade me from looking at it by dissing the product. Finally I found a knowledgeable dealer that knew the product, had some, and revealed they were easy for all dealers to get in our area: the others were just being obstreperous. Suck.

It's really annoying to me because I would love to just pick a dealership and go there for the rest of my life for all things automotive.

I don't like being ripped off but I'm not particularly price sensitive, so I'd love to just show up and pay a reasonable sticker price that was just The Price Everyone Paid and not have this vague haggling system expected, and not have to worry whether I was being ripped because I wanted a particular option. I hate having to think about decisions I don't particularly care about, so I would prefer to constrain my choices to "maker Y's automobiles", be it GM, Ford or Toyota for the rest of my life, so that once I have the capabilities I need out of an automobile there's only one or two choices. I would love the simplicity of the dealer being the default maintainer of my automobile and I just show up once a year or so and they take care of it in a pleasant experience.

It's irksome instead that it feels like they just want to trick you out of as much money as possible up front and that they don't want to have a maintenance department, but are legally required to.

I think service departments are actually pretty profitable for at least ICE dealerships. They certainly put the old college try into introducing you to the service manager even when you've purchased your car in a situation where you're unlikely to use that dealership for service.

My last purchase during the supply chain shortages was actually remarkably stress-free other than not being able to get the car sooner rather than later. I was paying cash. Knew there was almost certainly very little negotiating leverage on the list price. Did a bit of haggling on some "factory-installed" add-ons with a car that hadn't been built yet against my trade-in which I got IMO a good deal on.

The whole thing took me maybe an hour which is hard to complain about for a large purchase. One of the keys is being ready and able to sever the actual purchase from the financing and the trade-in. It's when people really are stretching their financial envelope (which is common) that conflating various aspects of the transaction starts causing a lot of stress.

Of course, it also helps if you've been around the block a few times. OK, if I MUST I'll watch the stupid video about some coating product but know that the answer is no. It's annoying but no more than lots of other things.

Yes, according to @whiteboardfinance, the car is 26% only of their gross profit. The rest is finance, insurance (warranties), service, parts, etc.

This is definitely something that Tesla nails imo. No haggling, a single price listed on the website that changes with market conditions. A list of options available with again explicitly listed prices. No slimy car salesperson trying to upsell the scotchguard on your carpets bs. No hidden prices where the websites lists price $x but when you get to the store they tell you its $x + y. A price, a delivery and its over.

> require an app + subscription

I would walk away if I saw that.

I would walk away if I saw that.

And that is probably why they go out of their way to not show you that.

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