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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."
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?
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.
Actually, that used to be possible. There were some shops that rented out bays and tools, and had mechanics on staff to assist if you wanted it. Great for those easy jobs that you get ripped off on, say like brake jobs, $2500 quote for all for wheels for my AMG.. fancy car aside, I did it myself with $1k in parts, rotors are kinda pricey, a jack, and about 2 hours, and most of that time was jacking the car up and down. Would have been nice to have a lift I could have rented, took me 5 min per wheel for parts swap.
However, most of those shops that used that business model in the DC/MD/VA area are no longer in business, so guessing the business model was not profitable. There also used to be some shops that rented out the bays and lifts on weekends when they were closed, but they stopped due to liability issues.
Maybe it will catch on again in the future, but for now.. I'm stuck with jacks and jack stands.. or spend $4k and get a portable half high lift.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
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.