[milanvrekic]

You want to have total transparency. It makes sense. The "secret" of the industry is that dealers are not in the car selling business, they are in the financing business.

Currently there is a lot of asymmetry of information between the dealer and a consumer. How do you know that the dealer is giving you the best offer from a lender vs. a bit worse offer from a lender they have a relationship with?

[ocdtrekkie]

To be fair on that, I regularly get requests from my banks for me to consider letting them give me a "better rate" for my auto loan, and it is generally three or four times the APR I got from the dealership for my auto loan. I tell them what it is, they apologize for bothering me, and hang up. So I feel like I (probably) managed a good deal there.

I'm going to shop around, so I don't really mind if the dealer is offering from a lender they have a relationship with. What keeps that in check is that another dealership will maybe offer me something better. I assume I can do this even if I am buying over the web.

I just found it particularly amazing how much the salespeople were focused on that monthly cost and dodging that total cost number or the term length. Maybe some consumers are fooled by this and let themselves get chained to something they'll be paying for figuratively forever?

I absolutely held it against dealers when negotiating if I felt like they weren't answering the question I was asking (literal total dollar price), so I feel like a website that exposed that information well would appeal to me.