> Guess what? The dealer sells multiple cars per day. You don't know enough to be a good negotiator against them.
Right - so let's get rid of negotiations all together and everyone pays whatever absurd price the sales team at Ford can think of without laughing out loud.
This isn't a box of cookies folks... besides your house, it's likely the most expensive thing you'll ever buy.
There is no "one" price for the asset... unless we remove all the competition that drives down prices (dealerships) and put all the assets into a single basket owned by one of a small handful of manufacturers in the world. What could go wrong?
The problem is Ford will be the market. They are only offering these EV's direct from their website. There will be no dealerships to compete with on price and service.
> This is Hacker News, and I've spent 10s of millions on servers, colo, and cloud.
I have no idea what you mean with that Ford comment. My best guess is that you think consumers are too stupid to consider anything but a Ford?
I did negotiate server/colo/cloud prices, but I spent person-months of effort deconstructing what the right price was. I've never done that for a car.
I once interviewed for a CTO job at a major storage vendor, and in the discussion they said that most of their major customers successfully reverse-engineered prices, and that kept their margins down. I've heard that (over beers) from some server resellers, too.
These major storage vendors only make the software; the hardware is commodity.
The customers figured out the prices of the hardware: disks or flash, a way to connect them to a "server", the "server", the network that the "server" offers.
Right - so let's get rid of negotiations all together and everyone pays whatever absurd price the sales team at Ford can think of without laughing out loud.
This isn't a box of cookies folks... besides your house, it's likely the most expensive thing you'll ever buy.
There is no "one" price for the asset... unless we remove all the competition that drives down prices (dealerships) and put all the assets into a single basket owned by one of a small handful of manufacturers in the world. What could go wrong?