If dealers are so big on competition, why have they bought laws in most states that make it illegal for a manufacturer that sells through dealers to also sell directly?

Do the manufacturer-owned dealers advertise their real prices, or make you argue for a couple hours to get close to their bottom line?

How long have you worked at an auto dealership?

And if you went through their BS, you probably could have gotten a lower price. They can’t give up their best price too easily or nobody will pay more. I’m not saying that you made the wrong choice to avoid the BS, but dealers keep their minimum acceptable price completely opaque so that they can milk as much as…

1. Manufacturers often provide the floor plan financing for dealers’ fleets. To the extent the dealers finance it themselves or with others, their costs of capital or financing go into their markups, which reduces the amount the manufacturer can get from the customers’ payments. There is no free lunch.

Except that dealers use opaque pricing (the advertised price is not the price they’ll offer me and the price they’ll offer me is unlikely to be the price they offer you). This prevents price comparison and allows them to jack up prices in a way that would not be possible in a competitive market that had transparent…

Actually, you probably do. Manufacturers that sell through retailers usually try to avoid undercutting their retailers by selling directly at a lower price. It’s probably often required by contract.

There really is one born every minute. Dealers have costs. Instead of having fixed prices, they pay people to spend hours seeing how much they can get out of each customer. They advertise. They have big buildings. Despite all of this, dealers still usually get rich. They probably have to add a little to the…

That’s kind of the point. Tesla should be allowed to sell its stuff without the stealers lying to customers, charging higher prices to certain customers, etc.

Well, the first cars off the line are supposedly going to employees, so they kind of are doing that.

Cells =\= packs. Anyway, as I understand it, the production of the cells is some sort of joint venture. Also, they’re already making the cells that will go into the 3. The thing that will be new in the model 3 is the pack, which is not “sourced” from anybody but Tesla. So, HarrySeaward was right in his critique of…

Tesla makes a gross profit on every Model S and Model X it sells. It’s gross margins are something like 27%. It also loses money overall because of its massive spending in R&D and expanding plant to produce the Model 3, power storage products, etc. If it hadn’t been increasing production by something like 60-80% a…

I thought the statement that they hoped to reach 10,00 cars per week sometime in 2018 was pretty clear that they weren’t going to make 500,000 in 2018. Unless you thought “sometime in 2018" meant sometime in January, 2018.

I love a story with a happy ending. Thanks.

Nah. I bounced and jiggled my kids to sleep after they ate many a time. I was doing something useful and they liked it. I wasn’t even completely useless at the most important task of all, feeding them. We usually had some frozen milk she had pumped earlier.

The things people will do for money.

Yeah. I’m pretty sure almost nobody has ever said or thought that, but that was your point, right? Please?

I have explained that to older male co-workers and I’ve never really had one argue that spending more time with family was a bad thing, but I live in a civilized place and my co-workers are reasonably intelligent professionals, not folks who get paid to be huge jerks on the radio.

People like that need to get the Richard Spencer treatment every day for the rest of their life. I’m going to my happy place now:

Having a work ethic doesn’t require being a terrible father who take every opportunity to show how unimportant his kids are to him and how little respect he has for his wife. This guy pretty much defines the word douchebag.