

He'll either lobby Congress for legislation or file a federal lawsuit















Source: Automotive News

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Good for him
By jharper12 on 4/16/2013 10:50:12 PM , Rating: 5
Dealerships are a legal racket and scam. They exist to make purchasing a car miserable and expensive, and concentrate wealth among the few fortunate enough to own a dealership.

They were needed back in the day, just as unions were, to protect the interest of a person/organization taking a risk. Now the only risk is that they will continue forever making our lives miserable. I say, make it legal for automotive companies to drop dealerships that don't maintain high standards of customer service. Do we need to change the system entirely? No. Just allow those awful dishonest dealerships to get what's coming to them. Then the good ones will get even more business, and the bad ones will get closed or reorganized. That's the real American way.

RE: Good for him
By Motoman on 4/18/2013 7:08:56 PM , Rating: 2
Yes, the whole dealership thing is a ridiculous mess. And they don't deserve essentially any of the special legal favors the laws have been woven to give them.

But you can do pretty well these days as an informed consumer with a small amount of research online. You can find out what the dealer invoice is for the exact vehicle you want, what dealer incentives are in place for it, so on and so forth to understand exactly what that vehicle actually cost the dealer. And then you can offer them what you feel is a fair price for them above and beyond that. Because they're not going to sell you a new car for $0 profit after you've accounted for dealer incentives and whatever else.

The last time I bought a new truck, I did all the research and figured out what the truck was going to cost the dealer to was something like $10,000 less than the ~$45,000 sticker price.

I walked into a dealership, gave them the documentation I'd printed out describing the exact truck I wanted, and that showed the dealer invoice, incentives, cashback allowances, so on and so forth, and then told them what I would pay. Which was exactly $1,500 more than what their final cost was. And no, I'm not paying for any "doc fees" or anything else. Out-the-door, you can make $1,500 off of me, or I'll move along to the next dealer.

Maybe I could have gotten the truck for less margin. But that was a price that I was OK with and that the dealership agreed to pretty quickly, once they realized I wasn't kidding, and wasn't budging. And there's little point in pissing off the dealer, granted that you may find yourself needing to go back there for repairs and whatnot at some point.

Naturally you can find all kinds of info on the net about the games dealers play with buyers...4-square worksheet things, financing tricks, so on and so forth. But it doesn't take much effort anymore to just sidestep that whole little circus and be an informed buyer.

