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Online Car Retailer Launching Nation's First Car "Vending Machine"
cartechboy writes "Last year's Gallup poll showed that car salespeople are the least trusted professionals in America, ranking even below members of Congress. Enter, Carvana, an online dealership operating in Atlanta, Georgia. They allow customers to shop for cars online, secure loans online, and pay for cars online. Now they have gone one step farther and are claiming to remove the despised car salesperson from test drives and even post-purchase pickup by creating, yes, a giant auto vending machine. The facility, which will open at the end of November, will be a fully digital, 24-7 interactive 'vehicle-delivery center' designed to offer customers pick-up options after purchasing a vehicle online. They'll have floor-to-ceiling windows, custom LED lighting, flat screen TV's plus interactive keypads that identify customers based on unique buyer credentials. There will be three car pickup bays to allow for simultaneous pickups. One thing they won't have: car sales people (Note: there will be customer service reps there to answer questions). Carvana plans to expand on the idea, presumably if this Atlanta facility works."
I mean no weekend trips (they probably limit the time/mileage/etc), but need to go shopping or head to the car dealership? perfect!
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Carmakers like Saturn (RIP) offered no-haggle pricing and compensated their sales staff for being consumer-oriented.
The reason car salespeople are horrible is that they're set up to compete with the consumer for a concealed amount of money that is either in rebate or discount to the dealer.
Thus for the consumer, it's guesswork against a predatory salesperson interested only in their commission.
Futurist Traditionalism
If I shake it real hard will a free car fall out?
We fill up ourselves in most gas stations, now we have car vending machines. Next, fix your car yourself in human less garages.
This is really great news.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
With some probable exceptions, car salesmen aren't genetically-engineered-dispicable-abhumans or anything, they are just what you get at the pointy end of a system designed to resist non totally-fucked-up market pricing through a mixture of social flimflam, feature obfuscation, mandatory bundling, etc. (Sort of like trying to get an actual 'price' for a nontrivial medical procedure, except that with the car you are usually conscious the entire time, making it less pleasant)
If you aren't trying to fuck around on prices, I'd venture to guess that you'll automagically get at least apathetic salespeople, rather than overtly slimy ones. Actually good ones might require additional management and technique. However, at the same time, it's not as though there aren't dozens of ways to design confusing and abusive web interfaces for inhibiting comparison shopping, pre-filling unhelpful checkboxes, hiding useful things, and generally shoving the user around.
Barring gross incompetence on the part of either the management or the web devs, the experience is going to follow the economics. Are you running a business moving goods you think people will want at clearly stated prices? Your humans or your website will likely be pretty easy to deal with. Are you fucking around with the user? You'll either get slimy pressure-jockeys in person, or an absurdly unhelpful and downright malicious site. The medium is not the message, in this case.
And the makers don't want to make it easy on you. For instance I was trying to compare the inside volume of minivans. All the makers had sites in Flash with the dimensions and other stats impossible to extract, much less to compare even with other models of the same brand. Had to write them down manually in a spreadsheet. Of course some magazines have nice charts for you but they tend to go for the flashy models and anyway aren't interested to publish specs for anything from the current year or older.
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Traditional car dealerships are owned by wealthy, powerful folks who've managed to preserve their monopoly via lobbying their local and state legislatures to force the auto manufacturers to sell thru the dealer chain. This forced "3 tier" system (a lot like the others many states enforce on commodities which throw off a lot of tax revenue, like alcohol, where a chosen few are granted a limited number of licenses) does nothing to help the consumer -- instead, it limits choice and artificially drives up the price. There's no practical reason for these laws in 2013, yet we still have them. I'm hoping that companies like this one and Tesla manage to disrupt the obsolete, 20th Century business model, but I have my doubts.
This means you can be absolutely ruthless with the price . . . you can get the same thing anywhere else. Do your homework online and find the price that people are actually paying, and call every dealer within 150 miles and ask for their best price. Start playing them against each other, and eventually, one will work with you -- typically towards the end of the quarter when they're all trying to make their number, or at the end of a model year when they have excess inventory. If you don't get exactly what you want from a certain dealer, tell them to pound sand and walk. They prey on most folks' discomfort with the negotiation process -- you need to turn the tables on them and be a little opportunistic, but you can save many thousands if you do so.
Go to Wolfsburg, Germany and you can see twin towers that do the same thing. I didn't buy a car there, I only visited, so I don't know all the details. My understanding is that you go there, pick out the car you want, and then you go to the tower and watch the robot pick it up and deliver it like a coke in a vending machine. I watched it serve up a few cars. It's pretty cool.
Scion, Toyota's badge aimed at young urban crowd, also has no haggle pricing
Every other car dealer in America also offers no haggle pricing. Just pay the price on the sticker.
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first they seem to only sell used cars
and a quick check of honda acords,their prices aren't cheap. $20,000 for a 2012 model. and the cheap one at that with no options
the prices at the dealers are the same and i can trade my old car with them at the same time
when car brakes after falling in Vending machine you own it and must pay costs to get it fixed. No refunds as well.
He even recommended against getting the factory fog lights for $500 and instead just get a brighter main bulb after market.
Cool that he wanted to save you money but he doesn't seem to understand how fog lights work.
My wife and I just bought a used current-year model from Enterprise, the rental car people, and did most of the work at home on my computer. Found the models we were interested in, the price and mileage, and then went to the dealership, about a mile from home. And they were willing to go to other Enterprise dealers, 20-30 miles from here, at no charge, to get a model for me to look at, with no pressure on me to buy it once I'd seen it. They had many models to choose from, and there was no pressure to buy. And they have the same 7-day return policy. If you don't need a brand new car, this is the way to shop! We had the car at home less than 6 hours after we first left to shop.
when car brakes after falling in Vending machine you own it and must pay costs to get it fixed. No refunds as well.
What if the machine breaks the brakes before the brake can break the brakes?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Actually, dealers make very little on financing or sales. They make the lions share of their income from service and warranty work.
Think about it, you get the car for the price you want, you have good credit, you get 0% financing, where is the inflated financing aspect. They might get a finders fee from the bank, but that's about it.
But your advice is still valid, going in with a loan approved from your bank or credit union is a great idea since you already know your limits. But at the same time, the dealer will still want to run the numbers, and occasionally come back with better rates and figures. I did this, had a loan approved from my credit union at 3% interest (was for a used car, never going to get 0 rates on those), the dealer came back with 2.75. Sure it is only .25 but that makes quite a different over a long term loan on a $60k car.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
If a car brakes will falling in a vending machine, it will be fine as the brakes performed as intended... Now if the car breaks, that's a different story :)
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Mod up, Fog light are supposed to low to the ground so they don't light up the fog directly in front of you reducing visibility - brighter main bulbs would just reduce visibility further in thick fog. Sales people have a bad habit of thinking they know more than they really do.
Scion, Toyota's badge aimed at young urban crowd, also has no haggle pricing.
There is no such thing as "no haggle pricing"...everything is negotiable.
You can get better than the listed price just by asking in places like Sears, Best Buy, restaurants, etc. You can do this even in places like WalMart, if you can go high enough up the managerial chain. I know, because I have done this personally.
Any car dealer that claims to be "no haggle" is lying, as there were many people who negotiated better than the marked price on Saturn vehicles.
Exactly. If you don't want to haggle, don't haggle, just pay more. The whole "no haggle" pricing BS means "we're screwing you as hard as we can."
Brighter main bulb? Go fuck yourself. Please.
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That would be a tough break.
I live in a small town a couple of hours away from a major city. A couple of years ago my wife and I went to the local dealership to try and get a reasonable priced lease on a new Camry. Not only did the local dealership insist on us paying full sticker price, they also wanted to add on top about another $1000 for dealer added "upgrades". They were absolutely adamant about not budging on the price, to the point of insulting me to my face claiming that I just didn't understand financing. After a few hours of back and forth we left disgusted.
Flash forward two weeks later. We go on over to the major city, make an appointment with a salesman at one of their Toyota dealerships and book a hotel room for a weekend of R&R in case this goes south. We show up at that dealership and are greeted by a friendly guy who has a couple of cars ready for us to pick from for a test drive. The sticker price goes out the window as he starts off with a deal about $2500 under the factory sticker, no weird dealer add-ons, and all the same or better features as we were looking at in the small town. Quick test drive and some paperwork later and we were in and out in less than an hour with a far more pleasing experience and at least $50/month lower payment than the local dealership was trying to foist on us.
The lesson to be learned here is that not all dealerships are created equal. Yes, some of them are packed with slimeballs out to screw you over, but others do in fact have decent folks staffing them and a non-sociopathic manager who understands that giving people a good experience at a reasonable price will get so much more business in the long haul that it's the far better path to take. You really do have to shop around. Oh, and it helps to know the dealer invoice price. If you know what they paid for the car then you're in a far better position to negotiate.
TL;DR If you're willing to shop around you'll find that not all dealers are dickholes.
No way they're rated below politicians. Must be a really old survey.
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With a salesperson, they know better... they are willing to say anything to make a deal... The adage of "how do you know when a salesdroid is lying? Their lips are moving." holds quite true.
I'm not exactly a car salesperson's best target. I don't change vehicles often, and I keep my old vehicles, so trades are not a game they can play. When I go to buy, I end up speccing out exactly from the manufacturer I am looking for after doing my homework [1].
[1]: Things like specifying additional keys with the order since an additional $100 is cheaper than $500 per key once the vehicle is at the dealer, or making sure a diesel has a variable high idle option so the DPF [2] does not get plugged.
[2]: I envy Europeans in this area. They get real diesels that don't need concentrated urine to function, nor excessive emissions which do little to no better for air cleaning than the existing ones.
it will be programmed by car salesmen
i absolutely fucking hate haggling. being on either end of it. it's probably my own unique emotional defect, but it makes me fucking sick to my stomach to think that i am required to fight with someone just to get a fair price on a product. so i guess i am likely being screwed when i buy something. but honestly i don't really care anymore. i'd rather buy the product from a machine and never even have to speak to a sales person.
Eh, I liked this version.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It's true that car dealers make quantitatively less from new car sales (used car sales are much higher margin), but it's not a bad income stream once you realize that they "own" all their cars via leverage.
When they sell a Camry, they don't really pay the full $25,000 invoice (or whatever it is) to have it sit on the lot. They essentially lease it from the manufacturer. So they may be leveraging $500 of their own money or something like that to have the car sit on the lot for, say, 60 days. When the car is sold, the "loan" is paid back with the proceeds from the sale. Let's say the dealer nets $1000 after paying back the loan and after subtracting all the business overhead, they're making $1000 on a $500 investment. That's a pretty decent return. Even if the dealer only nets $250 from the sale, it's still a 50% return.
Think about this next time you feel sorry about how the dealer's not making money off new car sales.
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