Service With a Sly Smile

I can never take my car to a dealership service area without a vague feeling of mistrust. I feel like the foreigner in an Eastern bazaar: I know what I want, I am fairly savvy, but the "natives" are wily and they have the edge; they are "the experts", ever willing to throw a bucket of doubt on my small flame of knowledge.

In the first place, your vehicle is whisked away to a back operating room where anonymous dirty handed people pull and hammer pieces of your car in an alarming manner, stick computer linkup cables to sockets (I wonder if those things are even hooked up) and soon, a verdict on the condition of the car is passed. You have no idea how. But the verdict always falls into one of two categories:

(1) "There is nothing wrong with your car at all, Mr. Healey". Either the service order says "could not replicate" or "normal", both of which are surprising, since the car won't start without a comical explosion from the engine bay and a cloud of smoke from the tailpipe.

(2) "I am sorry to say that there is a problem with your car, Mr. Healey" (which I know, since I took it in because there was a problem). "Apparently the descombubulator of the master cylinder has burnt out sending a flash to the electronic ignition system resulting in a problem of premature explosive cycle. We located the part at a dealership in Zimbabwe, and the service department can get us the part by say two weeks from Wednesday, cholera epidemic permitting". Cost? "Oooh. Let me see. I have the kids to put through college, the mortgage to pay off , AND the dealership needs to make money. I'd say about $1,500. If we don't find anything else". Warranty? "Oh no (giggles)! Our warranty doesn't cover normal wear and tear. This part is both worn and torn, so the warranty doesn't apply".

And, as John Lennon said, " I am not the only one to feel this way". Dealerships could go a long way in gaining consumer trust with a few simple measures:

(A) Make the back room a mechanical showroom with huge plate glass windows where customers can see what the mechanics are doing. Even operating theatres have these now. Are these guys doing more than microsurgery?

(B) Show us all the paperwork. How much does the replacement part cost as per your catalogue? How many hours does the manufacturer estimate to change this part? (Most manufacturers have such a table for almost every part on the vehicle).

(C) Show us the parts. Ohio law (and there are similar laws in other states) requires that the mechanic offers to give us the used parts, and to hand them over if requested. Very, very few dealers do this (I have only seen it once, at an Audi dealership). At most, a few will ask you to initial a tiny box with tiny print relinquishing this right. Don't do it!

(D) Attitude. We have all been to dealerships where we are treated as rather tiresome dullards, who would not understand what was wrong even if they tried ever so hard to explain, so why bother? Pay and move on, bub.

Some dealerships have tried to allay our mistrust with free coffee, a comfy seat and a good magazine, usually depicting their vehicles in a most favorable light, and highlighting the many awards they have received. I'd rather see what they are doing with my car. I can get a good cup of coffee anywhere, but a good dealership is hard to find.

Car Supermarkets Far Off and Far Out?

No and yes, respectively. GM's continuing fascination with a merger with Chrysler which this blogger has strongly criticized has now spread speculation that the companies could consolidate dealerships. This is of course tacit recognition that the car market has become, in many segments, comoditized. It is only a question of time before someone wakes up to the fact that selling cars in exclusive dealerships is a luxury fewer and fewer manufacturers can afford and more and more shareholders should question. Besides which, the old argument that specialized dealerships "know the product and are loyal to the brand" is bull excrement. Any person with a modicum of research in their head can walk onto the floor of any showroom in the nation and instantly confound the sales person with a few rudimentary questions about the vehicle on the floor. I once visited a Ford dealership in Cincinnati here the salesman had difficulty in identifying a Ford Escape versus a Ford Explorer. Dealerships are going to have an increasingly hard time justifying their existence.

Let's look at the car purchase rationally. If I am in the market for say, a minivan, does it make sense for me to spend days wondering around different dealerships, haggling with different sales people and financing companies, or does it make more sense to go to "Joe's Mini Van Market". There under one roof I can see a series of minivans, from several companies and compare them. I can see features I like or don't like and quickly choose the one I like best.As the idea catches on, soon "Joe's Market" will have a minivan department, a pickup department, a sedan department, etc. All under one roof. Paradise!

For the manufacturers it means tremendous efficiencies as parts are shipped to Joe's Market based on computer models that show how many vehicles he has sold, and what they are likely to need in the first, second and third year of warranty. Prices would be have to be competitive and the whole archaic process of dealer incentives, hold backs, etc. would go away in favor of a fixed commission for Joe, with perhaps bonuses for vehicles sold. Saturn's idea of "no haggle pricing" would be a welcome innovation, with sales at different periods of the year. It would be Joe's headache to deal with salesmen and the public could easily opt for the best vehicles at the most competitive prices, with a margin for personal tastes, thus making manufacturers more efficient by being able to rapidly hone in on what the public wants versus what they are selling.

If this sounds like it makes sense, it does. It is essentially what happens every time you go to a supermarket or Best Buy or Sears. In fact, the question arises, why has someone not thought of this already? Well, for one, the middle man, the dealership, has a legal leg to stand on, against the manufacturer, if they opt to abandon their dealership network in this fashion.

But how exciting would it be to see Chrysler and GM started selling their vehicles through open markets like the one described above? How exciting would it be to walk onto a showroom floor with competing vehicles side by side?

If you hold shares in an American car company, it may time to start asking questions about how much the dealer network actually costs you as a shareholder, and to ask "why are we insisting on using a sqaure wheel when every other consumer product has already invented a round one?".