[jessriedel]

> you mean buying direct from manufacturer for their asking price online. I mean…

Ok, but buying from their local dealership’s website is not what most people mean when they say they want to buy cars online. Likewise, when they say they buy their pens online, they don’t mean they buy them from the website of their local mom & pop stationary store.

[talldatethrow]

I suppose, but if the price is non negotiable like with the Tesla model, does it really matter?

Would you really prefer to buy online and it gets shipped to your house via a trucker, vs buying it on the dealer website and their local driver or the salesperson delivers it?

[jessriedel]

For a big purchase like a car, I don't think home delivery vs. pick-up in town matters much at all. I'll defer to your experience, but my expectation is that cars are such a big purchase that the time cost of one trip to pick up the purchased car is negligible.

The reason people want to be able to buy directly from the manufacturer is that they want to see real posted prices so that they can comparison shop from home without needing to drive around to twenty separate dealerships (or have painful email conversations with twenty separate salesmen) to discover the real price for each car. In other words, they want an efficient public market where the posted prices reflect the actual going rate, so that they can be confident they are getting the fair market price, rather than needing to negotiate to avoid price discrimination.

[talldatethrow]

Not trying to argue, but few people that negotiate are doing it based on any true market value. If you see a BMW X5 for $50k on a dealer site, and an Audi Q7 for $50k, you can buy whichever one you want for $50k. I sold Audis when the Q5 first came out, and we simply wouldn't discount them. Tons of people would mention they could get $4k off at BMW, so why wouldn't we do similar. There simply wasn't a reason to. We would sell all of ours at MSRP. I suppose what you're saying is that you wish BMW just listed a lower price on their SUV that year so that everyone could compare easily? But if we go to the manufacturer model, it'll either still be static yearly pricing like MSRP is today.. or they'll do dynamic pricing like Tesla where people that bought the month prior sometimes pay a few thousand more than people that bought today.

Most customers come and try to negotiate down randomly. For a while the sites showing average price paid were interesting, and as a consumer I totally get it. But you can also get a feel for what deals a dealership is offering by just browsing their special page usually. And then buying like you would from the manufacturer.

Dealerships still play games partially because of the manufacturers sending limited numbers of certain cars and more of others. Currently Tesla is sitting on a large backlog of cars in storage. For other brands, dealers take up this slack. Dodge currently has a 2 YEAR supply of one of their crossovers sitting on dealership lots. It's going to be a huge problem for dealers.

[jessriedel]

> Not trying to argue, but few people that negotiate are doing it based on any true market value.

It’s because they don’t know the value and/or they are bad at negotiating. That’s why they want to avoid it. Likewise, when I invest my retirement money, I just want to buy a broad index fund where I know I am getting the market-clearing price. I don’t want to have to know a guy who can get me a great deal on Microsoft stock, could I come down to the lot and talk about it?

> I suppose what you're saying is that you wish BMW just listed a lower price on their SUV that year so that everyone could compare easily

Yes.

> But if we go to the manufacturer model, it'll either still be static yearly pricing like MSRP is today.. or they'll do dynamic pricing like Tesla where people that bought the month prior sometimes pay a few thousand more than people that bought today.

Prices fluctuate. Airplane tickets double in price overnight, and some of that is price discrimination. But the rules are clear: last-minute tickets are a more valuable commodity. At any time, I can check one website and see reliable prices all flights between two places. I don’t have to go to each airline website anymore, much less talk to a human.

> But you can also get a feel for what deals a dealership is offering by just browsing their special page usually.

This is a wasteful, inefficient way to run a market.