I'll post the same thing I posted in the Bob Lutz on the Tesla thread with some amendments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10457754 https://news.ycombinat

I'll post the same thing I posted in the Bob Lutz on the Tesla thread with some amendments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10457754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10457754 According to Bob Lutz having car dealerships is a pro. LOL, I am yet to talk to anybody who actually enjoyed the car dealership experience weather it's buying or servicing the car. The whole car dealer enterprise is a rent seeking business. In many states you cannot have the manufacture sell the cars directly. That's changing slowly -- thanks to Tesla -- the dealer lobby is a big contributor in many local and state wide elections. The pricing for the automobile / features is not clear to begin with. It's to the point that there's many competing business that try to give you true car pricing. And, every step of the way the dealership tries to extract another fee / charge for you via various tactics like destination fees, myriad of financing fees, unneeded insurance (tire insurance, ones that overlap with the manufactures warranty). Personally, I would love if the dealership model died. The alternative being ordering a car online and having it show up at home at a scheduled time. I imagine the same experience can be replicated the other way when the car needs servicing, schedule it online and have it picked up / drop it off and a point of aggregation of the car maker where they handle volume. And before you tell me about the test drive and getting a feel for the car. Meh. Your fooling yourself if you think that a 15 minute test ride will tell you much about the cars performance, comfort or even layout. You will only learn that the seats are uncomfortable on a 3 hour trip once you take that 3 hour trip. If a test drive is really important to you, you should really rent the car for a couple days. One could also make the argument that dealerships should go away based on their general discriminatory tendencies. Here's a recentish paper quantifying it: http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayres/Ayres%20Siegelman%20Race%20and%20Gender%20Discrimination%20In%20Bargaining%20%20for%20a%20New%20Car.pdf http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayres/Ayres%20Siegelman%20Race%... . The quantify how much more dealerships by different gender / race. The recent book named Phishing for Phools dedicates some time to this topic as well.