Car Dealerships

This is going to be a fun most, mainly because of something in the news a couple months back. A guy in Mexico City was a lover of the VW Beetle. He had always admired them – sleek, unique, a great drive and always a head-turner. So naturally, he bought one. But the way in which he bought the Beetle was the news, not the act of purchasing it.

A local camera crew recorded this phenomenon, a giant van, akin to a moving van, arriving to this guy’s home. The back of the van opens and out pops a new VW Beetle. This guy didn’t just purchase a Beetle, he did it on an online dealership platform, all from the comfort of his home. Naturally one has the option of going in and test-driving the car at a local dealership, and it is unknown if this guy partook in that, but the fact you can now purchase a car online, sight unseen, is truly remarkable stuff in the larger car dealership world.

We know what the present looks like (and how we’re moving into the future), but let’s take a couple steps back for a moment. The “horseless carriage” as Germany’s Karl Benz referred to it, was first sold in 1888. We’ve written on The Motorwagen here before, and those first commercial car sales were handled in lots, like a car dealership lot you will find on most corners today. Remarkably similar, with the exception that at that time the manufacturer was the seller, or at least a representative from his or her business was part of the process.

Benz sales took off and by the end of World War II car sales were booming. Stateside some big changes in how cars were sold at dealerships occurred in 1958 when Senator Almer Stillwell Moroney had a law passed that required dealerships to place a sticker on every car with a recommended dealers retail price. This sticker is still around today and is a symbol of early regulation to protect the consumer. The industry continued to grow until the early 1970s when the price of gas began to slow everything down a bit. Manufacturers suffered revenue losses and dealers discovered the act of leasing. Once this caught on dealerships could begin to turn around cars every 2 to 3 years as opposed to every 5 to 6. This is many ways led to the birth of the used car market.

Car dealerships today are principally brick and mortar as we know, but getting back to the beginning of this post, the online market is heating up. TrueCar, Autotrader, RelayCars, the list is growing by the day. The beauty of this option is convenience. Today, new, and many certified pre-owned cars are extremely safe buys. This is because the auto industry has nearly perfected the way in which they produce automobiles and from a reliability standpoint they are all slam dunks. The notion of buying a lemon in 2020 is very outdated. As such, there is not a better time in history to do this than now online.

Try it out but do ask for the local test drive. We can’t imagine buying a car without at least popping behind the wheel!