> in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience
And see Tesla knows this, which is why the margin on their cars is higher than most.
You may have disliked that sales experience with a dealer or used car salesperson, but it quite likely got you a slightly better deal than had you tried to negotiate yourself.
The margin might simply be from cutting out the middleman while keeping the middleman price. So, the buyer is not necessarily better or worse off. But not having to go through a pushy salesman is a big win. It’s why I love Carmax (and would probably like Carvana).
Tesla was supposed to pass some of those cost savings onto the end customer not to pocket it all like this but I'm aware that it's a corporation that's looking to maximize profits to their shareholders and extract as much value as possible from their clientele.
Tesla, like every other publicly traded company, sells their product at a price they feel they can get away with, in order to maximize profits. Any cost savings in the process only affects the floor price, which they're probably not selling at.
In the current market, most figurative Tesla dealers would be charging $7k+ over MSRP, which is what you can currently make immediately flipping any newly-purchased Tesla, even the base Model 3s. I'm sure there are some who would stick to MSRP out of "professionalism", but it wouldn't be the majority.
This obviously won't last, but just something to consider.
If you buy a Toyota following the Tesla model, where you call and say "I'd like to buy the car you have, for the price you have listed", you will also have a generally good experience.
I wish that was the case. The dealership experience seems designed to maximize the pressure and extract as much value from customers as possible.
My first Toyota dealer experience was offering to buy a car at advertised price, and them refusing/countering with a lease. We just walked out.
Based on that, I waited until Toyota offered pretty good unadvertised discounts and called up a bunch of dealers with an offer/car in mind. I got the car my wife and I wanted for $1k more than my offer, which was I think $9k less than MSRP, and the experience was way better. We only had to sit through the finance departments upsells.
The third sale was paying MSRP at a Lexus dealer and we still were there for almost 5 hours.
Oh yeah, it was on a plug-in prius. MSRP was I think 37K and we paid 28k. It was something like $6k in manufacturer credits because sales had stalled after Toyota ran out of carpool stickers. The dealer only knocked off $3k, and I'm sure they still made money on the sale.
My Toyota experience was okay, but I still needed to sit at a dealership for almost two hours to deal with the paperwork, wait for financing, etc. Tesla allowed me to take care of all of that from the comfort of home.
Buying a Ford was the worst experience I've had with a new car, but that could have been entirely on the dealership.
Yes, they are there all day, until closing time, or longer. Usually, the longer you stay, the more likely you are to buy their car, or give them more money. They control the situation and the incentives are in their favor. This is one reason we loathe car shopping.
And see Tesla knows this, which is why the margin on their cars is higher than most.
You may have disliked that sales experience with a dealer or used car salesperson, but it quite likely got you a slightly better deal than had you tried to negotiate yourself.