The $1.50 Costco Polish dog was a thing of beauty. The $1.50 Costco hot dog can can fuck right off.

Someone else said this does not have to be a binary decision. I agree. Tesla can be sold direct, OK. They still need repair sometimes. If this direct sales were to spread to other makes, its only one part of the dealer that goes away. I am pretty sure car dealers employ more people in the repair and service areas than…

No. Dealership sales departments are shit for employment. The vast majority of them will have the top 10%-20% guys who have been there for years, everyone else will constantly rotate out because they can’t actually afford to spend 100 hours a week on the lot for $100 per car (new) and banking on hitting volume goals.…

These franchise laws were originally lobbied for by the OEMs themselves, because it meant that the losses from unsold vehicles fell onto the dealers instead of themselves. Now that times are changing, they’re trying to reverse course. Neither side is doing this to make the consumer experience better, it’s all about…

“In my many years of vehicle ownership, I’ve never encountered a dealership that wasn’t either a horrible or grossly expensive experience.”

The American method of car buying is to have hundreds of cars on the lot to choose from to take home RIGHT NOW.

Tesla’s model is not a dealership.

the only people the dealership model benefits are the already wealthy car magnates that have been in the industry for decades

I’m sure that’s true, but a lot of dealers now seem to take the approach of throwing junior people in, letting them fail and repeating with fresh meat. Compensation is marginal at best if you’re not selling a lot, which results in a sense of panic / desperation, which is hardly a good environment to learn a skill. And…

Automakers use dealers as a dumping ground for unwanted production and they serve to insulate the automaker from consumer complaints. It’s not the automaker that designed a terrible component, it’s the dealer that charges too much - the makers use them as human shields.

Good. Let that skill go the way of the buggy whip: only available to those who for some reason enjoy it. I, for one, would like to buy my next vehicle online without speaking to anyone. My job involves a lot of talking and the less I speak to service industry people outside of my job the better I feel.

There’s a Tesla service center about a half mile from where I am sitting, and it is in the same building as the sales department. I imagine that is a pretty typical arrangement.  A dealer by another name.

Nearly every dealer I’ve worked with in our 7 new car purchases was a shitmonkey. Fuck dealers. The good ones are outliers (BMWSF was, in this regard, an outlier).

Neutral, what will end up happening is that manufacturers would have to set up warranty, sales, and service facilities (e.g. dealerships) anyways.

Neutral:

I don’t get the simultaneous pro-dealer and anti-dealer sentiments on this site. Clearly, Jalopnik is pro-dealer when it involves Tesla, but anti-dealer in all other regards.

Neutral: Are dealerships, especially when it comes to sales departments, any good at providing stable employment? Most dealers I’ve been to seem to have a revolving door of sales people, with perhaps one or two who manage to earn a decent living and the rest marking time until they can find something better.

Apparently you did.

A Quarter Pounder’s standard ingredients include beef, bun, ketchup, pickles, onions, and mustard.