[bradfa]

Tesla is leading the way today (somewhat painfully in some areas) but they're not the first to try fixing this. GM's Saturn tried to make buying simpler in the 1990s and surely there were other previous examples, too.

Ford seems to be testing the waters about how to simplify the car purchase process: https://fordauthority.com/2022/05/ford-dealers-will-likely-s...

There's plenty of dealerships who have historically had simple purchase processes with standard no haggle pricing but often buyers have to do extensive research in order to find such dealerships.

[_fat_santa]

Ford Corporate is livid with their dealers. Back in 2018 when they put out the Focus RS, dealers basically killed that car with markups. Dealers all marked them up 20-30k which put them around 70-80k OTD. While some bought it at that price, they all just languished on the lot and Ford eventually cancelled due to sluggish sales.

An almost similar thing happened to the F150 Lightning, Ford had to threaten dealers that they would withhold any future deliveries if they caught wind of markups.

[a2tech]

From what I'm hearing from friends that work inside Ford, the dealers have burned all their bridges. Ford is sick of their crap and is working to move to direct customer sales (their electric vehicles I believe have already made steps towards this).

[deelowe]

Doesn't help that their service centers are just awful.

[nradov]

If Ford had really wanted the Focus RS to succeed they would have just built more cars. Dealer markups only happen on models in short supply. There just aren't many customers willing to pay even $40K for a small Ford hatchback, even though it had good performance specs.

[czstar]

Tesla has increased prices a lot. What’s the difference to the consumer if the increase comes from the manufacturer or a dealership? Tesla also is known for delaying vehicle deliveries if you don’t pay extra for FSD. Tesla just appears to be better than a dealership but they engage in the same shenanigans.