The dealers should be worried. Nice they used a Terra for the picture.
I disagree with this paragraph
"For decades, buying a new car in America followed the same recipe: go to a dealership, take a car for a test drive, and then watch some finance manager draw the four quadrants out on a piece of paper while negotiating the final price. This method is so deeply ingrained with car buying in the States that it feels pretty much natural."
I did that in the 1990s and it was awful. In fact, I will probably never buy direct from a Toyota dealer because of the experiences I had then.
The procedure for buying a car now, and for at least the past 15 years has been
- check online inventory of local dealers
- contact dealers fleet or internet sales manager only for the dealers with in stock vehicles with the model and color I want. Prefer dealers with multiple more of the same model and color marked as "in transit to dealer"
- negotiate sales price over email. Make sure to compare against kbb.com, AAA pricing, Costco pricing and any other online sales deal you know of
- test drive car
- purchase car, decline every single add on offered by the finance manager who knows what is up and is just going through the motions. If required to close the deal, agree to financing on Friday night, make sure there is no pre-payment penalty.
- On Monday, pay off dealer financing with cash or a better rate loan from your local credit union
Ok, I'll get off my soapbox now. I have no sympathy for most dealerships, Kearny Mesa Hyundai excepted, I hope Scout Motors is successful in their direct to consumer sales.
A journey into the Republican soul in 2023.
slate.com
"
This was opening night of the NADA Show, the annual convention of the National Automobile Dealers Association, one of the most powerful trade organizations representing one of the richest professions in America, and there was much to celebrate.
The years since COVID hit had been some of the industry’s best ever. Supply-chain issues had sent prices skyrocketing. New car prices were up; used car prices
were up even more. “This has been an unexpected bonanza for new car dealers,” George Hoffer, professor emeritus of transportation economics at Virginia Commonwealth University, told
Time late last year. Only a few months prior, the research firm Haig Partners clocked average gross profit for dealers at
180 percent over 2019 levels.
Really, the past hundred years had been great. Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the
top 0.1 percent of American earners. Car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors, it turns out, make up the
majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year.* Crunching numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, data scientist and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that over
20 percent of car dealerships in the U.S. have an owner banking more than $1.5 million per year.
And car dealers are not only one of the richest demographics in the United States. They’re also one of the most organized political factions—a conservative imperium giving millions of dollars to politicians at local, state, and national levels. They lobby through NADA, the organization staging the weekend’s festivities, and donate to Republicans at a rate of 6-to-1."