The issue isn't "online buying."<p>The current dealership model creates and tolerates incentives for dealers to rip me off at sale time. It also injects a set of complexity into the model, where if I choose to buy a car of brand X, I then have to comparison shop for the exact same car at multiple dealerships.<p>I've bought two Teslas, and the nice thing about the process is that it doesn't matter where I pick up the car, I get the same price, and the exact same experience. Tesla also won't try to rip me off on buy-ups like tire protection and seat protection. (Then again, Tesla really needs price protection because they significantly dropped the price of the Model Y shortly after I bought it.)<p>One of the most annoying situations was a Subaru dealer that made me sit through a pitch for various upsells (that were rip offs) and then sign a form that I listened to them.<p>I really hope the Amazon car purchases explicitly prohibit upsells and other nonsense. Just bring me the car, give me the keys, and stay long enough to make sure that the car works. No BS upsells.
You search for Toyota Camry. Your search returns thousands of generic car accessories.<p>You filter by category: Automobiles. You still need to scroll through 15 pages of miscategorized vinyl wraps and seat covers, but eventually you see a few actual car listings.<p>One has lots of good reviews, but the reviews seem to be praising a completely different product, like a phone charger.<p>You shrug and click buy. Two days later, you receive a rebadged Geely Panda delivered from commingled inventory by a seller called JGLEWYU.<p>You fill out the return form and drop it off at the nearest Whole Foods parking lot.
Well, unless they are bringing in ten thousand options with brands and models having names like <i>OSDKIFRU, KDJFRIUER, CNUEIR, IOUYRRF, CSOIFR, LOIWUEB</i> I have no reason to buy from Amazon.
> Importantly, the end seller of the vehicle is still the dealer; Amazon’s platform will be the middleman between the customer and the dealership. It’s unclear whether the company is talking to other automakers about listing their vehicles on the site.<p>Doesn't get rid of dealerships. Still interesting though.
What's the point of this? How is Amazon going to make Amazon level impact/money here? It's just another online portal to buy a car. Feels like some VP had a pet project and ran with it.<p>I bet the dealers still get to upsell you on body undercoating or whatever before the sale is finalized. Is amazon going to handle loan approval? Or do they think that people will just up their Amazon Prime chase card limits to 40K and pay for it the same as box of paper clips?
I've said before and will say again: I'll vote for any politician that kills the car dealership model in the US and lets me buy directly from the manufacturer.
Amazon (sort of) did this in 2013:<p><a href="https://www.autoweek.com/news/a1939026/buy-nissan-versa-note-through-amazon-sort/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.autoweek.com/news/a1939026/buy-nissan-versa-note...</a>
How is this better than the Costco auto program, which has multiple participating brands?<p>Unlike Amazon and the dealers on the platform, Costco is a brand I trust to do right by me and go to bat for me if participating dealers try to play games.<p><a href="https://www.costcoauto.com/enterzipcode.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.costcoauto.com/enterzipcode.aspx</a>
This seems like driveway.com
Kind of a cool concept, but falls apart when dealers get greedy and are involved. I "bought" a car on driveway.com, and then a few hours later I got an email and was told that the dealer already sold in "at the dealership". So basically they just list things there and if they can get a better price in house, they just cancel sales
This is a first step before Amazon secures dealership licenses in 48 states and puts brick and mortar operations out of business in yet another vertical.
From the article, it seems that it's going to be the dealers who list the cars on Amazon.<p>This means all the hassles associated with going to dealerships, plus Amazon gets a cut and tells dealers how much to mark up cars for optimizing whatever they want to aim for.<p>How is this better for consumers exactly?
Amazon is going to "work" with dealers until they figure out the game. I'm 100% sure this will backfire. Amazon likes money and dealers are leeches.