We have two cars, I buy a new one every seven or eight years, and we drive our cars into the ground. A car is nothing but a conveyance for me, and I have little interest in anything but the safety, economy and reliability of any car I buy, so car shopping is just an unwelcome and expensive chore. I bought a new car yesterday morning, and I have to say that if there’s a consumer experience that’s been more improved by the Internet than car shopping, I don’t know what it is.
Three cars ago, around 1990, buying a car meant sitting in a cubicle with a sweaty salesman who “checked with is manager” and played bait-and-switch by adding on dealer prep and $200 floor mats after we agreed on a price. Two cars ago, around 1996, I bought a Saturn when their low pressure, high transparency sales approach was a unique selling point — every other car brand was still pressuring customers on the showroom floor. By 2004, Edmunds was online and I used it to price the car I wanted and called around to local dealerships to see if they would match that price. Out of four or so I called, only one would even talk price over the phone. They had a special “Internet sales” department that, unlike the rest of the dealership, wouldn’t try to hold you in a cubicle for hours selling you undercoat. Yesterday, the dealership I used posted a price calculator on their website that pretty closely matched the Edmunds price, and the pricing part of the in-person sales process was simply a tallying exercise using exactly the same pricing schedule.
From my admittedly limited perspective, in the space of a couple of decades, car selling has gone from a non-transparent, screw-the-customer game to a fairly transparent, logical sales process similar to most other consumer goods. I have to imagine that car dealerships went through a major transformation to figure out how to live with lower margins now that they can’t charge for dealer prep (or maybe they just screw us in some other way). But, unlike, say, newspapers, car dealers just quietly adapted to the new environment without demanding special legal protection or whining and crying about how the Internet is ruining everything.