If automakers don’t care about their dealer experience, it’s going to cost them. This is especially true for the ones like Mazda and Kia/Hyundai which are trying to get at least some of their vehicles into the upmarket space.

Wondeful. Does that mean no more Tesla articles? If the gas shortage news was so big, why didn’t it get its own story? The negative articles on Tesla sure get their own headlines, but positive stories get “and in other news ...”

My problem with Jalopnik and its merry circus of Stan commentors is that it is not being transparent about its articles on Tesla. Is it because it gets page views? I think Jalopnik goes after Tesla and GM because of Union issues. These writers are very pro-union and are not being forthright about why so many negative…

>This presumes that whoever would run sales operations for the OEMs would be any better than the dealers are now.

With some of our dealerships around here, they would be hard pressed to do worse.

So then why so much coverage by Jalopnik when they were writing multiple articles blaming Tesla for the crash,  but when a report comes out that may exonerate Tesla the story gets buried on the proverbial back page?

I don't like Elon Musk, but I dislike dishonest "journalism" even more. I am a journalism "stan". Not a Musk fan.

I’m curious about the dealer wanting the customer to agree to a $10,000 markup before a test drive. I mean, they hadn’t agreed to buy the car, so you have $0 leverage by getting them to “agree” to that. It’s meaningless and just ruins the opportunity for business.

I don’t see how it “adds to the confusion” unless you’re deliberately confusing things. Dumbass got in his car, didn’t put on his seatbelt, accelerated as fast as possible, wrecked it and got bounced around the inside, RIP. It’s very straightforward except that it was breathlessly reported a different way for weeks.

Simple solution: Abolish all franchise laws and allow direct sales as an option.

I’d argue Lexus has to have a great dealer experience, because they’re not exactly competing on much of anything else these days.

“After that EVERYTHING was password protected.”

It would not be hard to implement a walkout survey system for any of these manufacturers. The fact they don't tells you everything you need know. 

I keep downloading it, it doesn’t seem to launch.  What am I doing wrong?

Punish management and executives? You must be new to the US. That’s not how it works here.

Unless a dealer conducts illegal activity, due to franchise law protections there isn’t a lot an automaker can do to “force” a dealer not to be slimy.

“Gas in the U.S. is increasingly in short supply because of a major cyberattack on a pipeline, Nissan had a record annual loss, and Tesla”

Sure would be great if the Pipeline Operator hadn’t downloaded that FreeHentai.exe.

I hope you aren’t referring to the Keystone Pipeline, that definitely is not a redundancy for any American oil infrastructure. It’s just shipping tar sands crap to refineries that’ll get shipped internationally from the gulf.

You want to stop these ransomware attacks so the pipelines keep flowing? Easy. Pass laws where if there’s loose cybersecurity and ransomware is successful, convict the company’s management for not following the law. That’ll wake up the companies if the execs, not the minion who double-clicked on the ransomware email…

Sure, but you can also look at the last 60 years of space travel and deduce that it’s an extremely dangerous frontier that can potentially kill you.