Ask HN: What would make you comfortable buying a car online?
I am a PM at one of the largest automotive marketplaces and I am working on understanding the future of car ownership and what "transacting vehicles online" really means in 2018.
So I have a question for the HN community: What would make you have enough confidence to buy a car on the internet? What kinds of vehicles are we talking? If it's brand new, I want to deal with a salesperson that isn't a scumbag. I used to be a sales guy for 6 years, and they're nearly all scumbags. So, preferably, I want no sales guy and no closer. I want total and complete transparency over what I'm signing for. I want my bill to be plain English. I probably want a service contract if I'm shelling out big cash for the vehicle. I want you guys to do all the paperwork for me at the DMV using my signature. If I'm going to be paying $200-400 a month for the next few years, plus another $200 a month or more in insurance, I want to be absolutely clear of what I'm signing and I want people to bend over backwards for me to make sure I'm never going to have to think about anything involving my car ever again. BECAUSE... I can just go buy a used car that costs me $92 a month for the next 36 months or whatever, and to insure it is only $50 a month. You see what I mean? It's a big difference in monthly spend. I'm willing to deal with scumbags and headaches from craigslist car purchases, or from my cousin's friend who is a dealer or whatever, if it means I'm saving several thousand dollars a year in car payments. Good luck!! I am not super concerned about seeing the physical car ahead of the order: I know the dealer can be held responsible should there be undisclosed damage. And I probably have already sat in the model of car I'm interested in long before I've bought one. The biggest thing is the unholy horror that is negotiating with car dealerships. How do I negotiate with a website? If I am not negotiating, am I getting as good of a price as I would have if I was? Additionally, I need a really simple/straightforward layout of what is or isn't included in the price and financing terms. Too often I had dealers focusing on the "monthly cost" while de-emphasizing the total cost, term of the financing, etc. That went not just for the car itself, but the add-ons like extended warranty and what-not upsells. I want to see the total cost of the car (as negotiated), the total cost of any add-on features, and the total cost of the financing package selected (interest over the term), and then the monthly cost of each over that term below it. You want to have total transparency. It makes sense.
The "secret" of the industry is that dealers are not in the car selling business, they are in the financing business. Currently there is a lot of asymmetry of information between the dealer and a consumer. How do you know that the dealer is giving you the best offer from a lender vs. a bit worse offer from a lender they have a relationship with? To be fair on that, I regularly get requests from my banks for me to consider letting them give me a "better rate" for my auto loan, and it is generally three or four times the APR I got from the dealership for my auto loan. I tell them what it is, they apologize for bothering me, and hang up. So I feel like I (probably) managed a good deal there. I'm going to shop around, so I don't really mind if the dealer is offering from a lender they have a relationship with. What keeps that in check is that another dealership will maybe offer me something better. I assume I can do this even if I am buying over the web. I just found it particularly amazing how much the salespeople were focused on that monthly cost and dodging that total cost number or the term length. Maybe some consumers are fooled by this and let themselves get chained to something they'll be paying for figuratively forever? I absolutely held it against dealers when negotiating if I felt like they weren't answering the question I was asking (literal total dollar price), so I feel like a website that exposed that information well would appeal to me. A verifiable third party check that the car is upto spec/will run and home delivery.