On the other hand, this could be an incentive to purchase zero-emission vehicles instead of the alternatives, as the buying experience would be theoretically much better than that of going to a traditional dealer.
Somehow car dealers in the U.S. have managed to enshrine this sleazy sales model into state laws, which is certainly an amazing feat of lobbying.
Also, having moved from programming to sales/marketing, I'm a bit more sympathetic towards the "call me" model of selling. There's a lot of companies (like mine) that aren't deliberately withholding information, but instead are training and enabling reps to walk you through a process that can't be navigated with blog posts and product pages alone. We do monitoring, and most of our customers treat our sales reps and pre-sales engineers as free consultants. Nothing magical about it, but talking to a human is valuable for problems like "how to a unify monitoring for my 1,000 servers are 24 teams which runs apps that are a result of 17 acquisitions".
I've designed complex electronic devices via product pages (data sheets) and other online information sources, and sold them to the Federal government through GSA procurement. I'm pretty sure I can "navigate" your "process" without wasting time schmoozing your sales guys on the telephone.
If you have a competitor who doesn't make me do that, they have a strong advantage over your company, right out of the gate. Just saying.
The more common scenario is that there are a ton of people involved, and it's not easy / worthwhile for the person who kicked this off to convince them all. Where the sales rep provides value there is they can help the you sell. You make an intro, they'll pull together a bunch of materials and demos and other crap to convince your coworkers that it's important.
We do have a self-serve path which is about as easy as anybody else's, and our prices are stated up front. Most people can navigate that technically, but the larger organizations almost never take that route because of organizational / political concerns.
It's a perversion of originally customer-friendly laws. The regulations were from an era where being able to be sure you have a local presence to service your car was very, very important.
Of course, you're cutting off the cohort of people who just don't want to talk to a salesperson - so you'll never convert those - but you're converting at a far higher rate with people who need explanations and a salesperson to help them navigate the internal blockers at the company.
There is a good joel-on-software post about this - essentially once the price goes above a set level - maybe $2000 all in - then the price has to jump because enterprise-y sales means that the buyer has to justify it to their purchasing, which means needing a salesperson to do all the grunt work to help.
A lot of people in the no-touch SaaS model think this is nuts - but the fact is different models work for different people. Just because two companies have similar-sounding products, it doesn't mean they are in the same market. Gmail and Exchange server essentially do the same thing, but the markets are mostly different, with only a small overlap.
It's like I heard a collective "bitch please" come from the banks, food wholesalers, defense contractors, insurance companies, immigration lawyers, patent attorneys, entertainment industry, telcos, etc. etc.
One has a plain-as-day pricing table with a $100 / month plan and a big blue "Buy now" button. The other company's Pricing page has $100/month plan with "Buy now" button and additional text: "Call us if you want to pay less".
nobody is going to make you call them for $100/month. ~$3k/month or ~$10k lump sum is roughly the threshold for enterprise sales that require you to talk to someone.
they do this because anyone who pays anything less than that for an enterprise service or product is going to be a demanding, unreasonable, cheapskate, entitled, caustic asshole because they're not used to spending large amounts and the money is probably coming out of their pocket (small business or soho customer). nobody on earth wants to deal with that kind of customer.
the phone call is designed to filter people out who get annoyed at needing to talk to someone. if you don't want to talk to anyone, you don't want to spend real money, because people who spend real money want to talk to real someones, usually multiple someones, the more someones the better. nobody wants to deal with the 'in between' customer who is too big for their consumer britches but won't step up to spend money for a real solution where real people on the other end of the line give a shit about their problems.
For some reason people that don't like to negotiate don't want to pay sticker price either.
Not only that but the sticker prices are usually artificially high since they are expecting negotiation with high prices for random add-ons like paint protection or other things nobody asked for.
2. I am not sure how is your opinion about price is related to the experience at the dealership. Sticker prices for all cars are available online, and you can make a decision if the car worth that price well in advance. Once you make that decision nothing is stopping you from having a great car buying experience.