Originally Posted By: Subdued
Originally Posted By: Wolf359
Originally Posted By: thooks
The archiaic system of buying cars at a dealer are about to end.
The self service kiosk will be used by 95% of car buyers within 5 years. It’s gonna be like checking in for a flight at the airport.
Ever hear of a company called Saturn? They were the no haggle dealership. They went out of business. Turns out people like to haggle. People say the same thing about real estate sales.
Also dealers have a powerful lobby, they've kept Tesla out of a few states because it's illegal in those states for a manufacturer to sell direct.
I don't know why you keep bringing up Saturn.
GM also closed shop on Pontiac and Oldsmobile. It has nothing to do with haggling.
https://www.forbes.com/2010/03/08/saturn-gm-innovation-leadership-managing-failure.html#3a9b2ccf6ee3
Here's some points from the article since you probably won't read it:
Quote:
--Because of an enthusiastic market response to their "different kind of car," Saturn retailers were chronically short of vehicles for the first five years of production.
--Saturn was the third best-selling car model in the U.S. in 1994. When the production lines switched over to the 1995 models, there were only 400 '94 Saturns left on lots across the country.
--J.D. Powers consistently rated Saturn as among the top three cars in owner and customer sales satisfaction. Even as late as 2000 it ranked second in owner satisfaction, behind Lexus.
--Most of the 9,000 Saturn employees (at the mid-1990s peak) came from other GM plants, through an agreement between GM and the UAW. This different kind of company was created by people who all came from the old, traditional kind of company. They changed the way they thought about the workplace, committed themselves to being world-class and altered many work habits to keep their promises to their customers. And they did so without any external incentives.
--Thanks to a unique partnership between Saturn and its retailers, in 1993 the retailers rebated back to Saturn 1% of the cars' sales price, to get GM's permission to start a third production shift. That brought $13 million to Saturn's bottom line, moving its finances into the black a year ahead of plan.
--Owner enthusiasm went off the charts, as was demonstrated when nearly 100,000 owners attended two "homecoming" celebrations in 1994 and 1999.
But that was then and this is now. What happened to that 1990s success story? Despite what you may read elsewhere, there were just two underlying forces behind Saturn's demise: GM's insistence on managing all its divisions centrally with a tight fist, and the demand by leadership at both GM and the UAW that Saturn get in line with traditional ways of doing things.
Maybe you should actually know what you're talking about before you post things on the internet.
Bottom line, Saturn failed AFTER they were forced to start the status quo.
You will notice that no one else copied has copied Saturn except maybe Tesla and they're losing billions. Maybe you can do that at the higher end of the market. Same problem with Carmax too, lots of people won't do business with them as mentioned in this thread. It's sorta like electric cars, Prius has been around a while, but they've had trouble making inroads to eliminating gasoline cars.
